ORAL ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

ENERGY AND CLIMATE CHANGE

The Secretary of State was asked—

Global Population

Martin Linton: What recent discussions he has had with his international counterparts on the effects of climate change on the global population; and if he will make a statement.

Joan Ruddock: May I first apologise for the absence of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State this morning? His partner, Justine, gave birth to a son on Tuesday, so he is taking paternity leave—thanks, of course, to the policy of this Government.
	To answer the question, the Secretary of State has frequent discussions with his international counterparts on the effects of climate change on the global population. Adaptation to the impacts of climate change is a key priority for international climate change negotiations, and we recognise that the effects of climate change will have the greatest impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

Martin Linton: I congratulate the Secretary of State and his partner on this new addition to world population.
	Has my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary read Kofi Annan's report for the Global Humanitarian Forum, showing that climate change is now responsible for 300,000 deaths a year—98 per cent. of them in developing countries? Has she also seen the forecast that if emissions are not brought under control, climate change will create 75 million refugees by 2034?

Joan Ruddock: I thank my hon. Friend for bringing that most important report to the House's attention. I have indeed seen the report and the figures that he has mentioned. We have absolutely no doubt that that adds to the pressure that we all as part of the international community properly need to absorb and bring to the discussions at Copenhagen at the end of this year. We will not get a global deal unless we can help developing countries to adapt to the effects of climate change, which are already happening and are, of course, the responsibility of the developed world.
	We are strong supporters of the United Nations framework convention on climate change adaptation fund, and we have given a considerable sum of money to the climate resilience programme, which is enabling countries to adapt. In Zambia, we are helping people living on the Zambezi flood plain to protect their crops against damage caused by flooding; in Lesotho, we are helping people establish small gardens to make them less vulnerable to food shortage caused by drought; and in Bangladesh, we are helping people to raise their homes on plinths to protect them from the seasonal rains. This country has led the way on climate change, not only on mitigation but on adaptation.

Peter Lilley: First, I congratulate the Secretary of State. I want to ask the Minister whether the Government's policy is based on ideology or science. She knows that for a theory to be scientific, it must be capable of being refuted by the evidence. Given that we have had three decades of rising temperatures, followed by a decade of stable and slightly falling temperatures worldwide, how many decades would she require before she were convinced that the theory on which she is committing £400 billion of taxpayers' money might be slightly wrong?

Joan Ruddock: The right hon. Gentleman is very fond of quoting rather alarmist figures—

Peter Lilley: They are your figures.

Joan Ruddock: Indeed, they are our figures, but we are talking about a sum of money that will be spent over more than 40 years, whereas the right hon. Gentleman presents it as if it were all for today. The issue that he has raised about science is very important. Scientists have been predicting for decades the effects of global warming, and the predicted effects are indeed happening. He needs to look at sea level rises, for example, which have been consistent, and the predictions are very extreme indeed. Where he claims that the temperature has gone down, that is very much a short-term phenomenon. When the period of temperature rises is measured against all historic records, it is very unusual. The consensus opinion of world scientists is that it extremely likely that all these effects are man-made. Even if he does not believe in the science, he should believe in taking action to adapt to what is happening—whatever the causes might be. We are quite clear as a Government that the consensus of world scientists is that this is a man-made phenomenon. We must take proper steps to tackle the continuing rise in greenhouse gas emissions, and we will do so.

Colin Challen: Quite right too. My hon. Friend will know that the Waxman-Markey Bill on tackling climate change is working its way through the US Congress, but it has already been watered down somewhat—and it has not yet reached the Senate. That suggests that the Bill could be watered down more.
	Considering that background, if we are to have higher ambitions in the EU based on a deal, should we not have benchmarks in place—I do not ask my hon. Friend to reveal those now, as they are obviously a matter of negotiation—to say that other annexe 1 countries, which one hopes the United States will soon become, should have higher standards and a better approach than that represented by the Waxman-Markey Bill?

Joan Ruddock: We are most optimistic about the commitment made by President Obama, who has said that the US will lead in the climate change talks. His Secretary of State has said that the US is determined to see that the talks produce a result, and we are confident that it will play a proper part.
	My hon. Friend is correct about the Bill—it has been somewhat watered down—and we are encouraging the Administration to have the greatest possible ambition: they are engaged; they accept the science; and they have negotiators with a positive approach. We believe that we will be able to achieve a global deal. It will be important that there is a commitment by the US to make the emissions reduction that is required by 2050, which is 80 per cent. for developed countries. Already, the President has said that the US can make that commitment. It is in a difficult situation because of the history under the previous Administration. We understand that, but there is a great deal of good will. This is a matter of negotiation, and we will continue to press the Administration for the greatest possible ambition.

Road Transport (Emissions)

Andrew Selous: What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Transport on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions arising from road transport.

Mike O'Brien: I join in the congratulations offered to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and his partner on the birth of their son. There are regular discussions between Departments. Indeed, on 19 May, the Secretaries of State discussed carbon budgets.

Andrew Selous: The Minister may be aware of the Chinese company BYD, which is spending billions on developing the battery-powered cars of the future. My concern is that the UK may miss out on that important market. Will he join me in congratulating Vauxhall on its superb Ampera model, which most people will be able to drive most of the time while producing hardly any carbon emissions? What action are the Government taking to install more public recharging points around the country to enable this incredibly important market for the future to develop here?

Mike O'Brien: A number of companies are taking the initiative to develop electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles, which are plug-in and rechargeable. We need to encourage such development not only in the UK, but worldwide. I congratulate Vauxhall on the work it has been doing and on the Volt, which is another General Motors product. That company has problems, but at least some real research and development work is being done. Increasingly, not just the energy companies, but some petrol and diesel suppliers, are recognising that they need to install plug-in points so that cars can be recharged. We are seeing the beginning of what, over the coming decade, is likely to become a vastly expanding industry, with thousands of such vehicles coming on to our roads.

Brian Iddon: Is there not a powerful argument for not producing carbon dioxide from transport emissions? May I alleviate the concerns of sceptics such as the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) by saying that we cannot go on acidifying the sea because the changes in that environment have gone way too far? That powerful argument for reducing carbon dioxide emissions is rarely used.

Mike O'Brien: My hon. Friend is right that we need to ensure that we are aware of the acidification of the sea and that we recognise it as part of the overall development of a transport and environment policy.
	The Government have been clear about the fact that we want real investment to go into developing vehicles that are less polluting—indeed, are low polluting—of the atmosphere. That is why we put £100 million into supporting research and demonstration of new vehicles and £250 million has been announced for consumer incentives in coming years for lower-carbon vehicles. There is a £20 million procurement of low-carbon vehicles for the Government and a £2.3 billion package of support for the automotive sector in the downturn, which has been tailored to support the development of low-carbon products.

John Randall: Does the Minister agree that his Government's proposal to expand Heathrow will inevitably lead to increased road transport and increased carbon dioxide emissions?

Mike O'Brien: As part of the process of developing our transport policy, particularly in relation to Heathrow, we have ensured that we have clear targets for emissions reduction. Clearly, bringing aviation into our climate change policies is part of that. In relation to road transport and Heathrow, we want to ensure that we develop policies on hybrid and electric vehicles that will reduce overall emissions from motor vehicles in the coming decades.

Greg Clark: Will the Minister of State convey our warmest congratulations to the Secretary of State and Justine on the birth of their son? We wish them much joy during the years ahead. I am lost in admiration for the meticulousness of Ed's planning: he has provided himself with an excuse to go to ground this weekend that is even more convincing than John Major's toothache.
	Can the Minister of State say which electric vehicles will qualify for the £5,000 voucher announced the week before the Budget?

Mike O'Brien: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his congratulations, which I will pass on to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. We will consult shortly on how the funding that we have announced will be best distributed. We want the growth in the use of electric vehicles to be a key area for development. The initiative will help to put electric vehicles within the reach of ordinary motorists, by providing help worth between £2,000 and £5,000 towards buying the first electric and plug-in hybrid cars when they hit the showroom, which we expect to occur from 2011 onwards, although some companies are indicating that an earlier date might be possible.

Greg Clark: Is it not the truth that no electric vehicle is available now, or will even be available in 2011, that will qualify for the voucher? If we want to build support for a low-carbon economy, is it not essential that we avoid such gimmicks and stunts?

Mike O'Brien: I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman sees the development of electric vehicles and support for consumers to purchase those vehicles as merely a stunt. There are already electric vehicles that are fine for short trips in the city rather than long-distance trips. We are prepared to put in place the incentives that will ensure that the technology improves—it appears that he would not do that were he ever in government. However, we are taking steps now to provide funding for research and development, and to identify funding, which the car makers and manufacturers will know will be in place, to provide incentives for consumers in future to buy the vehicles we want manufacturers to produce.
	The hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) was looking for congratulations to Vauxhall for developing a new type of vehicle, which might well—we must wait and see—meet some of the criteria. If the Government were to change, however, it appears that Vauxhall might well be severely disadvantaged, and his constituents would be disadvantaged by re-electing him. Conservative Front Benchers seem to be abandoning Vauxhall and its workers.

Domestic Buildings (Energy Efficiency)

Julian Lewis: What recent assessment he has made of the energy efficiency of domestic and commercial buildings in the UK; and if he will make a statement.

Joan Ruddock: The energy efficiency of individual domestic and non-domestic buildings is assessed primarily through energy performance certificates, which are required for all buildings when constructed, sold or let. The heat and energy saving consultation, published in February, sought evidence about energy efficiency in non-domestic buildings and asked for views on potential policy responses. We are now considering the responses to the consultation.

Julian Lewis: Is it not a fact that between 1997 and the present day there has been hardly any improvement in household energy efficiency in the United Kingdom, according to ODEX, the index that measures these matters, and is it not a fact that in the preceding period—the years leading up to 1997—there was a 14 per cent. increase in household energy efficiency? What is it about this Government that has destroyed the improvement, as measured by the internationally accepted standard?

Joan Ruddock: This country has a long history of poorly insulated buildings, which, as the hon. Gentleman knows, goes back many generations. The Government are making a real effort to ensure that much more attention is paid to insulation. We have already insulated 5 million buildings in the domestic sector as a consequence of our carbon emissions reduction target provisions and the obligations on energy companies. Our current programme will lead to the insulation of a further 6 million buildings, and, as I said earlier, we have introduced energy performance certificates. We have the green homes service, run by the Energy Saving Trust, and we have the Act On CO2 helpline.
	There are many, many strategies in place, and we are making improvements. People are saving money as a result of our policies, and they are lowering their carbon emissions. However, we accept that there is much more to be done. We recently engaged in a major consultation on a heat and energy saving strategy, which will bring about improvements in millions of houses over the next few years.

Simon Hughes: May I ask that our best wishes and congratulations be passed to the Secretary of State, his partner and their extended family on the birth of their little boy?
	Ministers know that so far we have performed very poorly in relation to energy efficiency in domestic properties. According to a ministerial answer, only one in 100 homes meets the required standards. The Minister has just referred to the range of existing programmes. Will she reaffirm the importance of the leadership of the European Union and the European Parliament in pushing forward energy efficiency? Given that this is also local election day, will she consider our proposal for the establishment of a single central Government agency to bring all the policies together, and for local councils across the United Kingdom to roll out a programme—arranged locally, but supported by national Government—to ensure that every home is a warm home within 10 years?

Joan Ruddock: The Government are always happy to consider any proposals on these issues from any of the Opposition parties. If the hon. Gentleman examines the heat and energy saving strategy, he will see that it includes options that are not dissimilar to his proposal. As I have said, we believe that we need much greater drive and much more co-ordination. We have learned from many of the programmes that will come on stream in the autumn. The community energy saving programme will enable us for the first time to deal with the areas in greatest need, house by house and street by street. It will give us a basis on which to introduce programmes that will make the whole population energy-efficient over the next couple of decades.
	We are very clear about the fact that by 2015 every cavity and loft that it is appropriate to insulate will have been insulated, and 7 million homes will have had a complete eco-makeover by 2020. That is a very positive programme. We will continue to keep everything under review. We need to do as much as we can, because the emissions from our homes constitute about 27 per cent. of total carbon emissions. We absolutely must get to grips with this sector. We shall need more co-operation and involvement on the part of the public at large, and I hope that all parties will play their part in helping that process.

Andrew Murrison: I commend the Minister for her efforts, but will she accept that a major part of the energy expended by a building during its life cycle is expended during its construction, and that the vilification of older property—particularly antique property—that is not capable of being double-glazed or cavity wall-insulated as part of the home information pack process is rather unfortunate?

Joan Ruddock: In this country, we have many historic and listed buildings. We are endeavouring to find ways both to preserve the fabric of historic buildings and to improve their energy efficiency. The Government have provided £1 million for ongoing work with the Energy Saving Trust. We know that we must achieve both those aims, and we are committed to ensuring that we do so. While that work is being undertaken, however, as the vast majority of homes in this country are more than capable of receiving standard measures, the most important thing we can do is both encourage people to get on with the work and continue with the Government programmes that give financial assistance and oblige energy companies to ensure that those homes that can be easily insulated are quickly insulated in advance of next winter.

Mr. Speaker: May I gently remind the Minister that I must ensure that we get through the Order Paper?

Gregory Barker: I hope the Minister will also pass on my very warmest best wishes to the Secretary of State and his partner.
	In the Minister's answer to my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis), she put her finger on the nub of the issue when she said that there are "many, many strategies in place", because the fact of the matter is that the Government's approach to energy efficiency is fragmented and confused. We have social energy tariffs, energy performance certificates, the decent homes standard, Warm Front, winter fuel payments, the low-carbon buildings programme, the carbon emissions reduction target, new building regulations, warm zones, the community energy saving programme, Fuel Direct, the green homes service and fuel poverty targets. No wonder the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has said:
	"There's a lot...out there...but it's hard to know where to start."
	Given that the Government are now totally paralysed and Ministers' minds are clearly focused elsewhere, is it not clear that they are never going to get to grips with energy efficiency, and that the bottom line is that the lights are on, but nobody's home?

Joan Ruddock: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his amusing contribution. I am also most grateful to him for having listed so many of the Government's programmes, and I hope the House is impressed by the extent of our work and our focus on these issues. The fact of the matter is that many programmes are required, because it is essential to involve many sectors and to have different approaches. We believe that there is scope for bringing approaches together—that is in the current consultation, which I recommend that the hon. Gentleman reads. I also thank him and the Liberal Front-Bench spokesman for their kind words about my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.

Copenhagen Conference

John Howell: What the Government's priorities are for a global agreement on climate change in Copenhagen in December.

Joan Ruddock: Our priority at Copenhagen is to seek a comprehensive agreement, which gives the best chance of limiting global temperature rises to no more than 2° C. To achieve that, we want to see ambitious emissions reductions targets from developed countries, action by developing countries to reduce emissions below business-as-usual levels and agreement on finance and technology flows to support developing-country action.

John Howell: I thank the Minister for that response, but what grounds does she have for believing that Copenhagen will be more successful than Kyoto and that unanimity can be reached?

Joan Ruddock: Since Kyoto, the world community has become more conscious of the science of climate change. In every country that we visit, no matter what its perspective, all the conversations that we have show a real understanding that the situation is very serious and that we need to avert the most dangerous climate change. Because of that, minds are much more focused and we have much more science—we also have a new mood in the United States of America, which is extremely important. We also know that China, which is doing a great deal domestically already, is now approaching the talks in a very positive manner, and we have great co-operation from the G77 countries. There is reason to be optimistic, therefore, and even more so because of the commitments that the US Administration have made.

Michael Fabricant: The Minister has stated that one of her personal priorities, which is shared on both sides of the House, is the increased use of electric cars. The first law of thermodynamics says that one cannot create energy, so what sort of cost-benefit or overall analysis has she done on the effects on climate change of having to produce the extra electricity generation capacity to power all those electric cars, which we hope we will have—they will certainly help asthma sufferers in the UK—in the years to come?

Joan Ruddock: The key to the extra generation of electricity is renewables— [Interruption.] I am being pressed as to whether or not that involves nuclear. We have said that there needs to be an energy mix, of which nuclear is a part. Nuclear power creates a lot of emissions through building and the mining of the ore, but when these facilities are in operation, they are then emission-free. So, of course nuclear power has a part to play, but renewables and, in particular—given that we are examining international needs and discussions—the ability to transfer technology, particularly to developing countries, to enable others to produce electricity by low-carbon or no-carbon means, are crucial. That is because there needs to be growth in those emerging economies. That is also why we are working with China on carbon capture and storage for coal, because that is another area where reducing emissions from energy sources is crucial.

Electric Vehicles

Robert Goodwill: What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Transport on the Government's policy on carbon dioxide emissions arising from the generation of electricity used by electric vehicles.

Mike O'Brien: Ministers regularly discuss these issues, and we are committed to reducing overall transport emissions as part of tackling climate change. We will publish our transport carbon reduction strategy this summer, which will examine, among other things, the development of electric vehicles.

Robert Goodwill: Electric vehicles are often described as having zero emissions—that may be the case as they drive down Park lane, but it is not the case at Drax, Ferrybridge or Eggborough, where the electricity may be produced from coal. Given the current energy mix of our base load, and given that after allowing for the energy loss at the power station and transmission loss an electric vehicle is only about 33 per cent. emission efficient, which compares with a figure of 45 per cent. for a diesel car, which is the more carbon friendly, the diesel car or the electric car?

Mike O'Brien: We are looking at the development of vehicles that will be increasingly low-carbon. That is one of the key reasons why the Government have already put a substantial amount of funding into research and development. It is possible to reduce the level of emissions from internal combustion engine cars that use petrol and other fuels, as well as developing electric vehicles, which are substantially lower generators of carbon and other emissions. We hope that such an approach will, in the long term, ensure that our environment is better protected. I think that the hon. Gentleman is right to say that at the moment we still need to work very hard on the research and development area, but that is precisely why the Government are putting in the extra funding and why, unlike his party, we believe we need to flag up the fact that consumers will be incentivised to buy low-carbon vehicles in the future.

Peter Soulsby: Notwithstanding the Minister's comments about the potential for reducing emissions from individual cars, is not the management and limitation of CO2 emissions in the generation of electricity potentially much more effective than reducing emissions from individual, carbon-fuelled vehicles, be they on the road or the railway? Does he agree that that is part of the overwhelmingly powerful case for the electrification of the midland main line and other similar routes?

Mike O'Brien: It is important that we ensure that we electrify our main lines and put in place a transport policy that not only ensures that we do not transfer emissions from the streets to power stations, but whose overall breadth ensures that we recognise that public transport and developing community-based transport are key parts of the future development of a low-carbon energy strategy in the decades to come.

Robert Smith: The Minister has made the point that the source of the electricity is crucial to the efficiency of the electric car, and therefore the Government have to deliver a low-carbon electricity-generating system. Would not the early introduction of smart metering help to make electric cars more efficient, so that they could be optimised to charge when the wind is blowing and renewable energy is available and surplus to capacity?

Mike O'Brien: The hon. Gentleman is right: we need to ensure that we not only introduce smart meters—we have already announced that we want to see them introduced across the whole country over the next decade—but investigate the uses that a smart grid system can make of the smart meters. In a decade's time, smart meters will have developed in sophistication, and be able to communicate with refrigerators and other equipment. It will be possible for signals to be sent from the central base to various gadgets in the home to reduce the amount of electricity they use at peak times and increase it during the night or other quiet times. We want a smart grid system to go with the smart meters, with a level of sophistication that enables us better to manage the amount of electricity that we use.

Topical Questions

Philip Davies: If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

Mike O'Brien: The Secretary of State has reason to smile because he has just become a father, and also because the new Department has now been able to move most of its staff into its new building at 3 Whitehall place. It is always challenging to set up a new Department, but the move should be complete by the end of the month. I have now moved out of a photocopying room into a Minister's office, which always helps, especially when I have visitors. The Department can now focus much more effectively on its key aims—to tackle climate change, to provide energy security for the UK and to do both at an affordable price.

Philip Davies: Will the Minister confirm the figures in his Department's document that say that the impact of the renewables target on gas bills will be to increase them by up to 23.6 per cent.? How many more people will that increase put into fuel poverty?

Mike O'Brien: The hon. Gentleman is creating the image that everything will happen immediately and that next week we will suddenly see massive rises. We are talking about a considerable period of time in which we will develop renewables and a range of low-carbon energy generation—something that his Front-Bench team also claims that it wants to see happen. We need to ensure that happens over the next decade—indeed up to 2050 and beyond—to deal with the problem of climate change. The costs of not dealing with climate change will be much greater for the consumer and the world. It is essential that we develop renewables—

Mr. Speaker: Order. In topical questions, I am looking for punchy questions and answers. Perhaps Mr. Hendry can try.

Charles Hendry: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. By the time the Minister has finished, the questions will not be topical any more.  [ Laughter. ]
	This morning we have heard from the Government about some of their consultation schemes on smart meters, energy efficiency, electric cars, tidal barrages, carbon capture, renewable heat and biogas. Does the Minister understand the frustration of so many people in the energy sector with the endless process of reviews and consultations? We need a Government with the power to make decisions and to stop just talking about things.

Mike O'Brien: This Government have made a whole series of decisions on issues such as smart meters and developing nuclear. The Opposition, however, are a different matter. Let us take the example of nuclear: they were in favour of it, and then as soon as the Government said that we would consult on taking a view on the move to nuclear, they decided to oppose it. After we announced our move, they decided, "All right, we're back in exactly the same position as we were before." Those on the Conservative Front Bench cannot make up their mind about most things, whereas we have set out clear strategies for developing renewables, for developing nuclear, for dealing with climate change and for ensuring that we have energy security in this country.

Robert Key: Will the Government make up their mind on how important they think tidal flow technology is? Of course we must harness green energy from the sea and of course it is possible to build something like the Severn barrage, but that would cause irreversible damage to the environment and economy of the whole Severn estuary. Instead, can we please put far more resource and effort into tidal flow technology around our coasts?

Mike O'Brien: We are consulting on the development of this key area. Using tidal and using containment of tidal developments at the 4-metre tidal wave level in the Severn, we know that in the future we can develop a level of electricity generation around our coast that will help to protect our environment. That is why ensuring that we go through all the environmental analysis of the Severn estuary and of the development of tidal and estuary electricity in the future is key to our energy policy.

Peter Soulsby: Increasingly, consumers are opting to sign up for so-called green electricity tariffs, often without knowing what they are getting or what they are signing up for. Will the Minister tell the House what the Government are doing to ensure that people are signing up for something of genuine environmental benefit?

Mike O'Brien: Of course Ofgem is responsible for regulating the various tariffs and the way the energy companies charge people for the different rates of electricity that they supply. Ofgem has just completed a review of some areas of charging. It had some concerns and obliged the energy companies to change some of their proposals. If particular concerns arise with regard to so-called green tariffs, those are matters that Ofgem needs to deal with and the Government would strongly urge Ofgem to be straightforward in ensuring that it deals with these issues.

Julian Lewis: We have established that domestic energy efficiency improvements under the Conservatives came to an almost grinding halt under this Government, but what about Government Departments? According to the display energy certificates for the 17 Departments, only two achieved a grade C and three achieved a grade E. Seven were graded F and five got the bottom grade of G, including the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Is that what the Government regard as leading by example?

Joan Ruddock: As the hon. Gentleman knows perfectly well, the fact is that many Government buildings are very ancient or are listed buildings. DECC is in that category. It is extremely difficult for a Department to raise its standards quickly when it is occupying such a building, but we are absolutely determined to do so. We are looking at every aspect of the heating, the ventilation, the water use and the waste in that building. We are committed overall as a Government to a 12.5 per cent. reduction in emissions from Government Departments by 2010 and we are confident that we now have in place sufficient measures to achieve that.

Andrew Selous: Will the Minister confirm that on current policies, the UK will fall woefully short of its 2020 target on renewable energy?

Mike O'Brien: No.

Nicholas Winterton: Will the Minister accept that the European Commission's proposals to mitigate climate change could well cost this country £9 billion a year by 2020? It is estimated that that could put 1 million more households into fuel poverty, and increase the average fuel bill by £200. Is that what the Government want to achieve? I am not sure that that will be very popular. Should they not pay more attention to energy security, so that we do not get three-day-a-week black-outs, and every other problem that we had in the past?

Joan Ruddock: Great attention is being paid to energy security. In the longer term, renewables will add to our energy security because they will reduce imports of fuel from other countries. The fact is that there is a need to do that work. The costs would be much greater to all of us if we did not mitigate dangerous climate change, and if we had adapt to the worst effects, so the money will be well spent. Of course, as we make progress people's fuel bills will go down when they are able to take up all the measures. They will save energy and therefore money. Although it is necessary to put public funds into the development of renewables and energy efficiency, we are committed to seeing that it is done fairly. Of course, we do not seek in any way to put more people into fuel poverty. On the contrary, we have a strategy to get them out, unlike the Conservative party.

John Baron: The consumer organisation Which? has calculated that there are something like 4,000 different tariffs; that can be very confusing for consumers. As a result, many of the people who are switching switch to a more expensive tariff. In the light of my ten-minute Bill, which would oblige energy companies to publish on their bills whether the consumer is accessing the company's cheapest tariff—an idea welcomed, by the way, by the Secretary of State at the Dispatch Box—what steps are the Government taking to ensure that energy bills are used to highlight important information such as that, in order to improve energy efficiency?

Henry Bellingham: Very good question.

Mike O'Brien: Someone said, sotto voce, that that was a very good question, and indeed it is. Switching has highlighted the fact that some people are not getting information that enables them to ensure that they are better off when they switch. We need to make sure that the information they receive is much more honest and valid; sometimes those who encourage switching provide some questionable information. However, there are websites where reliable information could be obtained, and making sure that that information is more widely known is important. We will publish our broader strategy on fuel poverty in due course, and we are considering some of the issues that the hon. Gentleman has raised. Certainly, one of the issues to which we need to give serious consideration is the idea that he puts forward of having more information on bills about the sort of tariffs available.

LEADER OF THE HOUSE

The Leader of the House was asked—

Parliamentary Questions

Robert Goodwill: What steps she is taking to ensure the completeness of answers to parliamentary questions for written answer.

Philip Davies: What steps she is taking to ensure the completeness of answers to parliamentary questions for written answer.

Chris Bryant: My right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House and I are fully committed to making sure that Ministers give faithful, honest, complete and timely answers to written parliamentary questions. We keep the matter under continuous review.

Robert Goodwill: I have to say that I am generally very pleased with the quality of the answers that I get from the Department for Transport, but occasionally—possibly because I am at fault, not having tabled the question precisely enough—the question could be open to misinterpretation. I was pleased a couple of weeks ago to get a call from an official at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Swansea asking for clarification, but more recently, I rather suspected that I had been fobbed off with an answer to a question that the Department would have preferred to have been asked, rather than to the question that I asked. Could officials be asked to take the opportunity to speak to Members more often to find out what information they need, so that Members do not have to table another question and incur more expense?

Chris Bryant: The hon. Gentleman makes a very good suggestion. In one particular case relating to some questions to the Department for Transport that he tabled, I have followed up on the problem that he had. I think that there was a misunderstanding in the Department, and the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham (Paul Clark), wrote to the hon. Gentleman this morning to say that he will make clear the precise situation and make a proper correction to  Hansard.

Philip Davies: When the Prime Minister said that he could not implement the full police pay rise of 2.5 per cent. at arbitration, but could pay only 1.9 per cent. because of the impact on inflation, I tabled a question to the Chancellor asking what the difference would be to the overall inflation rate if either pay rise were implemented. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury gave a long-winded answer that did not address the question. The Office for National Statistics could provide an answer, however, which was that either figure would not have made a blind bit of difference to the overall inflation rate. Clearly, the answer had not been given because it was embarrassing to the Government. Could we make sure that accurate and full answers are given, even if the information might embarrass the Government?

Chris Bryant: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: the Government should provide truthful answers, whether they embarrass the Government or not. I also take the point about providing timely and full answers, which is why this week I wrote to three Departments where there have been difficulties in providing enough timely answers. There is sometimes an issue with the numbers of staff who provide suggested replies to Ministers, and sometimes there is a problem for Ministers: for instance, one Minister in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, answers 600 questions a month. Obviously, that is a pretty severe stress.
	I had a sneaking suspicion that the hon. Gentleman might raise the issue of his question last year. I should not say that the three, or perhaps four, paragraphs of the Chief Secretary reply were long-winded; if anything, they were not quite long-winded enough. In fact, on the fuller letter and the question that he asked me previously, I did some following up for him and I think he has had a more substantial answer that goes into some depth about all the issues that he raises.

Shailesh Vara: We have had repeated assurances from the Leader of the House that Ministers' written answers will have attached to them all relevant information, so that it is easily accessible to other Members as well as to members of the public who may read  Hansard. It simply is not good enough that Ministers make reference to the "information being in the House of Commons Library". Earlier this week, however, I received a reply from the Department for Children, Schools and Families concerning the number of children who are taken into care. It is a serious subject that is of huge interest to a number of Members across the political divide as well as to members of the public, and the information referred to was not so long and complex that it could not have been made easily accessible and published in  Hansard. Will the Deputy Leader of the House undertake to have a word with the Children's Secretary, while he still is the Children's Secretary, to ensure that in future his Department supplies all relevant information in a format that is easily accessible to other Members and to members of the public?

Chris Bryant: I am absolutely sure that the hon. Gentleman is right. Ministers should not provide an answer that refers somebody to some obscure, other document, even if it is in the public domain. That is why I am happy to write again to Ministers and to ensure that we speak to the Cabinet Secretary, so that civil servants, via the permanent secretaries, also understand the expectation that hon. Members should not be fobbed off with a half or two-thirds answer, but receive a full answer. My only hesitation is that, before the Government came into power, in 1996-97, there were only 18,439 written questions; in the last Session, however, there were 73,357. Departments have to manage the process properly, so that we have high-quality, timely, faithful and honest answers in every case.

European Scrutiny

Anne McIntosh: What assessment she has made of the effectiveness of arrangements for the scrutiny by the House of legislation brought forward under the European Communities Act 1972.

Chris Bryant: EU legislation, as I am sure the hon. Lady knows because she has been around for a while, is transposed into domestic law by a variety of means, including primary legislation, secondary legislation under the 1972 Act and other secondary legislation. We continue to keep the effectiveness of all those methods under review and are happy to listen to proposals for improvement.

Anne McIntosh: The hon. Gentleman will be well advised to take advice from his right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House on the charm factor when responding to questions. He may or may or not be aware that the Government are considering removing part of the draft Flood and Water Management Bill that is before the House and introducing it in secondary legislation under the 1972 Act. Does he share my concern that that process does not allow for the same parliamentary scrutiny as a Public Bill Committee? It is highly regrettable in that regard. The legislation is not contentious, and that is why we should expedite and introduce the main—not a draft—Flood and Water Management Bill, rather than use secondary legislation, which is not subject to proper parliamentary scrutiny.

Chris Bryant: I did not intend to disparage the hon. Lady; I was merely trying to reinforce the view—of the whole House, I am sure—that she has considerable experience and expertise and brings wisdom to all her comments. She has made an important point, although she has completely and utterly misunderstood the Government's intentions on the particular issue in question. As she knows, we are committed to providing a draft legislative programme, and we will publish it in the not-too-distant future. We will consult on it around the country so that people will be able to put their views on precisely how we should proceed with the measures. We have also introduced the whole process of pre-legislative scrutiny, which gives the hon. Lady the opportunity to make precisely the points that she has made.

Robert Smith: Today, the whole nation should be looking at what is coming out of Europe that will affect this country. One of the crucial things to recognise is that transposing European legislation is a passive act of turning what comes concretely from Brussels into facts on the ground in this country. Should not the crucial message to the House and the Government be that we must ensure that that legislation is well and truly scrutinised before it is firmed up in Europe, so that when it comes to this country it is in a form that we can make best use of?

Chris Bryant: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, of course. However, we often transpose EU legislation into UK law not through statutory instruments but through primary legislation. A classic example at the moment is the Coroners and Justice Bill, which transposes large elements of the services directive. Similarly, it is sometimes appropriate for us to bring forward provisions such as the Swine Vesicular Disease Regulations 2009 through statutory instruments; we want to ensure that, after consultation, there is clarity and swiftness around the country in respect of such provisions.

HOUSE OF COMMONS COMMISSION

The hon. Member for North Devon, representing the House of Commons Commission, was asked—

Parliamentary Access

Nicholas Winterton: What steps the House of Commons Commission is taking to ensure unimpeded access to and from the parliamentary estate for hon. Members and staff at all times.

Nick Harvey: As you have said in the House, Mr. Speaker, the Serjeant at Arms is your contact with the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis on all such matters. The Serjeant at Arms continues to impress on the Metropolitan police the need and requirement for vehicle and pedestrian access to the parliamentary estate to be maintained.

Nicholas Winterton: As the House is well aware, recently the Tamil demonstration and protest meant that the access of Members and staff to the House was completely cut off and for long periods was greatly restricted. Only this week, owing to a demonstration by cyclists—representing the Green party and campaigning in the European elections, I understand—Bridge street was closed for a period, thus greatly inconveniencing Members of Parliament.

Peter Lilley: And the public!

Nicholas Winterton: And the public as well. Only this week, the very entrance to the House of Commons has been blocked by odd mavericks and others seeking to inconvenience—perhaps even arrest—Members of Parliament. Is it not time that the police, who appear to be completely unable to deal with the situation, developed a strategy and tactics to enable them to ensure that Members and staff of the House, and the public, have unimpeded access to the House of Commons?

Nick Harvey: We are aware of the instance to which the hon. Gentleman refers, but obviously policing on London's streets is a matter for the Metropolitan police. The service says that it has to give a proportionate response, which, in the light of complaints about the policing of protests, is understandable. However, we will continue to make clear to the service the need for Members to be able to get in and out of the House at all times. For the time being at least, protests in Parliament square are legal and legitimate. If the hon. Gentleman and others wish to see a change in the disposition of the law, there may be legislative opportunities to which they will wish to contribute.

Mark Field: I have some grave concerns about what is going on in Parliament square, not least because this is very much an iconic building and we have a lot of tourists who want to visit this area. Equally, I do not entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton), in that I think peaceful protest is an important part of the process as well. I want to stress to the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) that rules are already in place. There should be no encampment, as there has been of Tamil demonstrators in the past seven weeks, and there should be no more than 50 protestors at any one time. The police already have considerable powers in this regard, and they should be properly exercised.

Nick Harvey: We will continue a dialogue with the police, and the Serjeant at Arms will continue to make clear to them the need to sustain access to the Palace.

Peter Soulsby: Although I can well understand Members' irritation about this, I, too, impress on the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) the need to recognise that there is a balance to be struck between the convenience of Members and the legitimate right to peaceful protest, and to ensure that whatever solution is found to the current issues out there, that balance is struck.

Nick Harvey: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. However, I stress again that any change to the legislation is a matter for this House, while the detailed arrangements for policing the streets are a matter for the Metropolitan police, and the Serjeant at Arms will continue to impress upon them the need to maintain access.

Julian Lewis: Is it not a fact that the licence for the noisy use of amplified broadcasting equipment ran out long ago, and that no enforcement of the existing laws is being carried out? As long ago as October, we were promised in this House that legislation was imminent. When are we going to see it?

Nick Harvey: The timing of legislation is not a matter for me. The Joint Committee on the Constitutional Renewal Bill has been looking at the provisions, and we await with interest the legislation's coming before the House.

LEADER OF THE HOUSE

The Leader of the House was asked—

Business of the House

Simon Hughes: If she will bring forward proposals to establish a business committee to determine the House's business; and if she will make a statement.

Chris Bryant: Confidence in Parliament has certainly taken a hit in recent months, and the questions of timetabling and a business committee, which are being considered by the Procedure Committee, are ones that we need to address, bringing together Members from all parts of the House.

Simon Hughes: I am grateful for that more conciliatory response to the question than I have heard from the Minister before. Given that the Prime Minister is now clear that constitutional reform needs to go more quickly, and that the public seem clear that Parliament and the Government should be separate so that we can do our job in holding the Government to account, I hope that Ministers will now be positive about the business of Parliament—the House of Commons—being determined by Parliament, not by Government, and will be very supportive of this proposal.

Chris Bryant: Obviously, the Government are the Government only because they have a majority in Parliament. That makes the system that we have to have in this country somewhat different from that in some other countries, particularly those where there is no one party with a majority. The hon. Gentleman and others have made interesting points on this issue, and we want to ensure that that debate can be carried forward properly. In our present system, we have substantial measures to ensure that elements of the business are not decided entirely by Government but by the Opposition. Indeed, my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House is about to announce several days coming up that have not been determined by Government at all.

HOUSE OF COMMONS COMMISSION

The hon. Member for North Devon, representing the House of Commons Commission, was asked—

Freedom of Information Act

Andrew Selous: How much has been spent from the House of Commons administration vote on completed administrative and legal challenges to decisions of the Information Commissioner, the Information Tribunal and the courts made in respect of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Nick Harvey: Legal actions have incurred external costs to the administration estimate of £55,361 to date. The internal costs associated with legal challenges are absorbed within the cost of running the House administration and cannot be separately identified. The figure does not include costs charged to the Members' estimate.

Andrew Selous: A number of my constituents have asked whether that sum might be paid back out of existing budgets of the House of Commons. Is that possible?

Nick Harvey: I am unclear what the hon. Gentleman means. To whom would it be paid back, and by whom? If the money were paid to the Treasury from the House of Commons administration estimate, then it would be going round in a circle. I cannot see what public interest would be served by such a transaction.

Business of the House

Alan Duncan: May I ask the Leader of the House to give us the future business of the House?

Harriet Harman: The business for next week will be as follows:
	Monday 8 June—Motion to approve the seventh report from the Standards and Privileges Committee on Unauthorised Disclosure of Heads of Report from the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, followed by Second Reading of the Health Bill [ Lords].
	Tuesday 9 June—Opposition day [12th allotted day]. There will be a debate on youth crime followed by a debate on housing policy. Both debates will arise on an Opposition motion.
	Wednesday 10 June—Consideration in Committee and remaining stages of the Geneva Conventions and United Nations Personnel (Protocols) Bill [ Lords], followed by Opposition day [Unallotted half-day]. There will be a half-day debate on a motion relating to the Dissolution of Parliament in the name of the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru.
	Thursday 11 June—Topical debate: subject to be announced, followed by a general debate on social mobility and fair access to the professions.
	Friday 12 June—Private Members' Bills.
	The provisional business for the week commencing 15 June will include:
	Monday 15 June—Opposition day [13th allotted day]. There will be a debate on an Opposition motion: subject to be announced.
	Tuesday 16 June—A general debate on European Affairs.
	Wednesday 17 June—Mr. Speaker's valedictory and tributes by the House, followed by consideration of Lords Amendments.
	Thursday 18 June—Topical debate: subject to be announced—followed by general debate: subject to be announced.
	Friday 19 June—Private Members' Bills.
	The provisional business for the week commencing 22 June will include:
	Monday 22 June—The House will meet to elect a Speaker.
	Tuesday 23 June—Second Reading of the Marine and Coastal Access Bill [ Lords].
	I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 25 June and 2 July will be:
	Thursday 25 June—A debate on the report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights entitled "A Bill of Rights for the UK?"
	Thursday 2 July—A debate on the European Commission's annual policy strategy.

Alan Duncan: I thank the Leader of the House for giving us the forthcoming business.
	Although we recognise that the Government rather seem to have some other priorities at the moment, may I gently remind the right hon. and learned Lady that a Government are for governing? Will she therefore give us a statement on the whereabouts of the draft legislative programme? Last year it was published on 14 May, but so far this year there is no sign of it. Will she confirm that the concept of publishing the legislation in advance has been quietly scrapped, or is it perhaps just the case that this Government have run out of steam and have nothing left to offer?
	Similarly, may we have a statement on the Business Secretary's Postal Services Bill? It received a surprise—perhaps we could call it emergency—First Reading in this place on 21 May, only a day after its Third Reading in another place. Then we were given to understand from reports in the media that certain Cabinet Ministers—I am sure that neither the Labour Chief Whip nor the right hon. and learned Lady is among them—regard the Bill as "totally bonkers". Now we learn from her statement that no Second Reading is planned in the next fortnight. Can she tell the House when that is going to happen?
	May we have an urgent statement from the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform on the fate of Vauxhall and the jobs of more than 5,000 workers, which hang in the balance? There was a great flurry of activity on our TV screens earlier this week by the Business Secretary, who assured us about the future of the company. Yet while he has chosen not to give Parliament an update, reports today suggest that the Luton plant has now been classified as "at risk" by trade unions. At the risk of sounding churlish, may I point out that over the past 24 hours the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has seemed rather more interested in saving the Prime Minister's job than the jobs of British car workers. May we have a statement on that delicate situation as it affects the car industry in the United Kingdom?
	On the subject of unemployment, may we have a statement from the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on premium line telephone costs for Jobcentre Plus? As we have all feared, the number of people out of work has been steadily increasing over the past few months, but the Government are not making it any easier for those who are looking for work. They are being charged to dial in, hang on for ages and then often just get cut off. It ends up costing them a lot of money just to have an initial conversation on the phone. How does the right hon. and learned Lady justify charging people who have little income high rates—or even at all—for seeking advice on getting a job, particularly in the depths of one of the deepest recessions the country has seen?
	May I request yet again an urgent debate on the Government's handling of compensation for those who lost out from Equitable Life, another group of people whom the Government have so shamefully ignored? Twenty years ago, the then shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, who now happens to be Prime Minister, stood at this very Dispatch Box and spoke about Barlow Clowes and the ombudsman's report on that. He condemned the
	"fecklessness, gullibility and incompetence of the Government who, for months and years, ignored all the warnings".—[ Official Report, 19 December 1989; Vol. 164, c. 204-5.]
	How can the Government dishonour their obligations to Equitable Life policyholders when their stance in Opposition was so different on such a similar issue?
	Will the Leader of the House consider a debate on countries in the middle east and around that region that are at risk of failure, such as Somalia and particularly Yemen? I and many others fear that there is, once again, a danger of Yemen dividing between north and south and spreading instability in the area.
	May we also have a debate on educational standards? It is noticeable in the public exchange of letters between the right hon. Member for Salford (Hazel Blears) and the Prime Minister that neither makes use of that basic staple of punctuation, the full stop. As one of Tony Blair's former speech writers said in  The Times today,
	"New Labour began with no verbs and it ends with no punctuation."
	Is that another tacit admission that the Government have ground to a complete full stop?
	Finally, may I say on this day that whatever our political differences and persuasions—and whatever difficulties Parliament has been experiencing—for the sake of democracy, let us join together across the Chamber in urging everyone to get out and vote, and to do it for positive reasons for a positive agenda for the future of the country?

Harriet Harman: I absolutely agree with the point that the shadow Leader of the House has just made about the importance of our democracy and of everybody getting out to vote.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about the draft legislative programme. This will be the third year in which we publish the programme, instead of leaving it until the Queen's Speech, by which time a programme is set in tablets of stone, the ink has dried and there is no opportunity for people to participate in discussions about what should be in it. We intend, for the third year running, to publish the draft legislative programme in advance. The elections on 4 June and the rules about the purdah that surrounds them mean that we have not been able to publish it in the six weeks immediately prior to them. Publication has therefore been delayed, but it will happen shortly.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about the Postal Services Bill. I have announced the business for next week, and as he knows, the business for the following weeks is provisional.
	The shadow Leader of the House mentioned Vauxhall and the car industry, which is very important. Indeed, the Prime Minister addressed the matter in Prime Minister's questions yesterday, and it has been raised often in the House. We are very concerned about the car industry, particularly the plants at Luton and Ellesmere Port. We are concerned about not only those who work in those important plants but all those who supply the industry and the skill base that it supports. The hon. Gentleman knows that there has been big backing through Government loans under the automotive assistance scheme, in addition to the general help for business, and that the Business Secretary has held discussions to ensure that we do everything we can to secure those jobs, against the changing background for General Motors. It is important to appreciate that we do not believe in the recession taking its course, but in active Government intervention. We do not believe in cutting back, but in borrowing to back up loans to support business that is in difficulty. We also believe in working across Europe to ensure that we do well out of our work in co-operation with other European countries.
	The hon. Gentleman raised an important point about help for the unemployed through phone lines, so that they can call jobcentres. I will raise that with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, but let me say two things now. If we are to help the unemployed who, through no fault of their own, have lost their jobs as a result of the global financial crisis, it is important that we put extra investment into jobcentres. That is why we have put £1.2 billion extra into jobcentres to help people. The extra resources going into jobcentres, which the hon. Gentleman's party has opposed, should ensure that we can provide a good service, not only face to face but on telephone lines.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about Equitable Life. He will know that the Economic Secretary to the Treasury updated the House in the debate in Westminster Hall on 19 May on the progress that Sir John Chadwick has made in looking into the compensation scheme for those who have lost out under Equitable Life.
	The hon. Gentleman also raised an important point about the destabilisation in Yemen and Somalia. I will discuss that with my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and see whether there will be an opportunity to update the House, whether by written or oral statement, or by way of a debate.

Madeleine Moon: Can we have a debate on the responsibilities of householders when planting trees in their gardens which subsequently cause damage to the drains and foundations of neighbouring properties? I have talked to hon. Members across the House, and there seems to be a problem across the country, particularly when people plant ornamental trees such as ornamental eucalyptus. Insurance companies are increasingly including clauses that exclude householders from claiming when their properties suffer damage, yet those who plant the trees can walk away scot-free. Can we look into that, please?

Harriet Harman: I think that that matter comes under the auspices of the Department for Communities and Local Government. It is obviously a concern to my hon. Friend's constituents, and it has also been raised with other hon. Members by their constituents, so it might be a matter on which she should seek a Westminster Hall debate.

Robert Smith: I associate my party with the right hon. and learned Lady's important remarks about everyone getting out there to vote today, both in the European elections and in the local elections—for people who live where those are taking place—and about the importance of taking part in our democracy.
	The Leader of the House has given us the business for almost three weeks, which is a welcome new development that I hope will continue in future. The more the House can be informed of business far ahead of time, the more people outside this House will know how to influence that business. However, she also said that everything beyond next week was very provisional. Is that subject to the vote next Wednesday on the Dissolution of Parliament?
	On the subject of that debate on the Dissolution, Prime Minister's questions has been the only opportunity that the Prime Minister has had to deal with the question of why he does not want to have an election now. Often his answer seems to be because he would lose it, but he has not had the chance to expand on his reasons for not responding to the country's wish for an election. To that end, will the Leader of the House ensure that the appropriate Minister replies to the debate next Wednesday—and obviously the Prime Minister would be the most appropriate Minister to reply to such a debate, so will she ensure that he comes and gives a full explanation, both to the House and to the country, of his views on that Dissolution motion?
	Perhaps the reason why the Leader of the House said that the business was provisional is that she was tantalising us with the prospect of the Postal Services Bill appearing in the provisional business for the following week. It is vital for the future of the Post Office and Royal Mail that the Government should come forward with proper and effective means of getting investment into those companies. However, we also need a Bill that protects the Post Office and ensures that after all the upheaval in the post office network, it is not further damaged by the Government.
	In engaging with the public, the Government are quite keen on the use of petitions in local government. Last year the Government agreed with the Procedure Committee that we should have a modern e-petitioning system for Parliament. When will the Government ensure that that agreement is delivered, so that Parliament can have a functioning e-petitioning system?
	Finally, President Obama is making a major statement in the middle east today on relations with the Islamic world. Will the Leader of the House ensure that the Foreign Secretary comes to the House to make a statement on the implications for the UK's policy in the middle east of what President Obama says today?

Harriet Harman: The question of who responds to the Opposition day debate next week is a matter for the Government—

Simon Hughes: You are the Government!

Harriet Harman: Quite so, but it is not a matter of House business. Therefore the Government will decide, and put forward the appropriate person.
	The hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Sir Robert Smith) made a big point about the business for next week being announced whereas the business for the following weeks was provisional. Because he is standing in for the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), and because he is new to business questions, perhaps he does not realise that we always announce the business for the next week firmly, and the business for any subsequent weeks is always provisional. In order to help the House we try, whenever possible, to give as much notice of the business as we can, and to announce the provisional business as far ahead as possible. None the less, the hon. Gentleman has raised an important point: if people outside the House know what the business is going to be, it enables them to engage in the debate.
	One of the good outcomes of the awful scandal about the abuse of MPs' allowances will be that we have an opportunity to look afresh at all the processes in the House. Included in that will be how, and how far ahead, we announce the business, what mechanism we use to decide on the business, and what we should do about e-petitions. This will be a good moment for us to look afresh at all those issues on a cross-party basis.
	The hon. Gentleman asked how the House could be updated on the middle east. I will include that matter when I discuss the points raised by the shadow Leader of the House on Yemen and Somalia. He also asked about the Royal Mail. Of course we are determined to protect the Royal Mail, and to invest in and protect the post office network.

Ann Coffey: The Education Service in the House of Commons offers subsidised travel to schools wishing to visit Parliament. This is very popular with schools in Stockport, but the service is heavily oversubscribed, with the subsidy being allocated almost immediately on the day when applications open. Will my right hon. and learned Friend look into this to see whether more subsidy could be made available, so that schools such as Lark Hill and Alexandra Park can visit Parliament and enjoy the excellent educational tours offered in the House of Commons?

Harriet Harman: The opportunities for other people to come into the House and see the work that we do have improved massively over recent years, but there is an opportunity for us to review the situation. The more people understand about the work that their constituency MP does in the House of Commons the better, and providing schoolchildren with a better understanding of the House helps them to understand history as well as the modern processes of government. Enabling people from all parts of the United Kingdom not to be debarred from coming to the House on the ground of cost is something that we can look at on a cross-party basis.

Desmond Swayne: The Prime Minister has been making much of his proposals for constitutional reform and for a code of conduct for hon. Members—but in forums other than this one. Are we to be favoured with a statement about these proposals, so that we can scrutinise them?

Harriet Harman: I made a statement about the proposals that came out of the meeting of the three party leaders, at which the Prime Minister suggested that we have a parliamentary standards authority to regulate the question of expenses. However, the hon. Gentleman is right to say that the House should have an opportunity, sooner rather than later, to engage in the debate on how we review and improve the processes of the House, as well as considering the wider constitutional questions. He will know that there is a Constitutional Renewal Bill in the legislative programme. It has already been considered in draft by a Committee of both Houses, and it will provide a vehicle for further debate and discussion. No doubt more issues will come before the House shortly.

Colin Challen: I am sure that my right hon. and learned Friend—who is one of the calmer voices in the House—will be aware of calls from outside and within the House for a shorter summer recess this year. I hope that she will not mind my adding my voice to those calls. I would like to suggest that we come back here in September to hear an early Queen's Speech proposing the Government's next legislative programme—including a proportional representation Bill to be enacted in time for the next general election.

Harriet Harman: It is right that we have the opportunity to debate again our democracy and all the processes that underpin it. My hon. Friend talks about changing the dates to shorten the summer recess, but I think that it is very important that any changes we make in the House do nothing to undermine the constituency link—[Hon. Members: "Hear, hear!"] I am talking about the rootedness of Members of Parliament in their own constituencies. We need to scotch the idea—I am not saying that my hon. Friend was suggesting this; I know that he was not—that when we are not in the House, working in Committees or in the Chamber, we are all on holiday. At those times there is an opportunity—I would say an obligation—for Members to be in their constituencies working with their constituents. If we had shorter summer recesses, we would have more time in the House and less time in our constituencies. One of the things that we need to do is to make this clearer across the piece, so that our constituents can see the work that we do in our constituencies, as well as the work that we do in the House.

Mark Hunter: May I associate myself with the request that the hon. Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen) has just made?
	Car parking charges at Stepping Hill hospital in Stockport, which serves my constituency and those of several other Members, have been dramatically increased, suddenly and without warning. They have gone up from £1.50 for three hours to £2 for two hours, £3 for two to four hours, and £5 for more than four hours. This is a problem not only for those who have to pay the charges; it is also bad news for those who live in the surrounding area, who are now suffering even more as people look for an alternative to those parking arrangements at the hospital. Is it not about time we had a debate on the scandal of car parking charges at our hospitals?

Harriet Harman: The hon. Gentleman has given an example of how a constituency Member of Parliament dealing with a foundation hospital can have a big impact through representing local people who want changes in the car park charging policy. I suggest that he take up this matter directly with the foundation hospital. He will no doubt be supported by other hon. Members whose constituents use the hospital.

Martin Linton: Can we have a debate about the rise of the far right in Europe, and of those on the newly emerging fruitcake right who seem to believe that climate change is a myth, and homosexuality an illness? I am sure that my right hon. and learned Friend would have no truck with those parties, but the official Opposition seem determined to become a new ingredient in the fruitcake.

Harriet Harman: We will be having a debate prior to the European Council, and I am sure that my hon. Friend will take that opportunity to catch the Speaker's eye and participate in that debate, and to make the point that we all need to work together in the interests of Britain's economy, of the environment and of protecting ourselves against international crime. We have to work together in Europe, and siding with what my hon. Friend describes as a few fruitcake parties from the far right would not be in the interests of the people of this country.

Nicholas Winterton: May I warmly congratulate the Leader of the House on her remarks about the link between Members of Parliament and their respective constituencies? That link is vital to the parliamentary system in this country. Is she also aware that there have been calls today, not only from the Conservatives, for the more meaningful involvement of Back Benchers in the business of the House?
	I refer particularly to the establishment of a business Committee, which could go much wider in representing the House than the current rather informal business committee. Will she give serious thought to that suggestion? Is it not an appropriate subject for an important debate? Could we not consider merging the Modernisation Committee, which she leads, with the Procedure Committee, which could achieve so many of the things that both she and the Prime Minister have talked about to improve democracy?

Harriet Harman: As I said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen), we should take the opportunity to look again at the mechanism for arranging House business. As Leader of the House, I would welcome the views of all parties on the matter.

Peter Soulsby: Given the recent media interest in how public money is spent on the pay and allowances of those in public life, may we have a debate on the pay and other remuneration of BBC superstars and on the irony of the corporation's use of the familiar pretext of the Data Protection Act to seek to prevent openness and transparency in public life? In such a debate, may we have the chance to say to the BBC, on the basis of some recent experience, that resisting the public's legitimate right to know how their money is being used to remunerate all those in public life is likely to end in tears?

Harriet Harman: When public money is spent, the public are entitled to know about it, and salaries for presenters at the BBC are paid for out of public money. Now I have heard it argued that it would be invidious to publish those salaries because it would prompt competition from commercial organisations that might try to head-hunt those presenters. However, that risk applies to everyone in public service—the salaries of permanent secretaries, for example, are published and they, too, could be head-hunted by the private sector. However, many people work in the public sector because they believe in public service broadcasting or the important work of the public sector more widely. I do not buy the argument that salaries cannot be published because of commercial confidentiality because it seems to me that the issue goes further than the Data Protection Act. I believe that gagging clauses are drawn up to prevent BBC presenters from disclosing the salaries that they have negotiated, but the Equality Bill contains a clause to ban such gagging clauses because we do not think it appropriate for employers and employees to be bound not to reveal information about pay—not least because that might provide an opportunity for pay discrimination between men and women.

Jeremy Wright: May we have a debate in Government time about "phoenixism"—in other words, going out of business one day and going back into business a few days later, doing almost exactly the same thing, leaving creditors unpaid and customers without the goods and services they have paid for? Does the Leader of the House agree that the House should discuss this matter particularly now, when this pernicious practice is resulting in many of our constituents being unable to recover money they can ill afford to lose?

Harriet Harman: When someone goes out of business, that affects other businesses in the supply chain, as the hon. Gentleman said. Perhaps he could raise this matter again in the debate immediately after business questions, which is about supporting business through these difficult times.

Andrew MacKay: I return to President Obama's highly significant speech in Cairo this morning. Bearing in mind that our country is still probably America's closest ally and has huge interests in the middle east, and given that the Leader of the House has said that the topical debate for Thursday has not yet been decided, may I suggest that there could not be anything more topical than a debate on the middle east, particularly in view of the American President's speech, and that it should be led by the Foreign Secretary, if he is available?

Harriet Harman: I will certainly take that as a constructive suggestion for next week's topical debate.

Peter Luff: May I push the Leader of the House again on the question of the timing of the Postal Services Bill? If the Government are intent on proceeding with the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail, they need to get on with it because the private sector partners cannot tolerate the uncertainty. If, on the other hand and as well-informed sources suggest, the Government have abandoned those plans, the Bill is still necessary in other respects, particularly to deal with regulatory issues surrounding the winding up of Postcomm and its merger into Ofcom. We still need the Bill and we need to get on with it very quickly.

Harriet Harman: As the hon. Gentleman will know, the Bill introduced in the other place has completed its passage there, so it is available to be brought before the House. It is not in next week's business, so I am afraid that he will have to wait until next week's business statement to see whether it is part of business for the future. I appreciate him making those comments—by saying that I may seem to be breaking the spirit of what I said to the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Sir Robert Smith). I am aware of that paradox.

Peter Lilley: I have previously asked the right hon. and learned Lady whether we could have a debate on the impact assessment, or the cost-benefit analysis, of the Climate Change Act 2008. It showed that costs had doubled to £400 billion since the Act came into force and that the Secretary of State had accidentally mislaid £1 trillion of benefits. Thanks perhaps to the intervention of the Leader of the House, for which I am grateful, the Secretary of State has written to me saying that we could debate these issues in connection with statutory instruments on carbon budgets. Those have been debated in the other place, so will she tell us when they are going to be debated in this place? Can she assure us that they will be debated on the Floor of the House and can she tell us whether they result from the Climate Change Act 2008—and are therefore something that the House could reject in principle if it so wished—or, as the text of the statutory instrument suggests, they come instead from the European Union Climate and Energy Package? If so, the Government have produced a separate cost-benefit analysis for this package on that basis, which therefore means that although we could go through the charade of debating them, we could never reject them.

Harriet Harman: I will raise this issue with my colleagues in the relevant Department. I know that the right hon. Gentleman has raised the matter on a previous occasion. It might be necessary for him to meet the Deputy Leader of the House and the appropriate departmental Minister in order to sort out the process issues. I appreciate that the right hon. Gentleman is trying to ensure that the processes are right for dealing with the matter.

Michael Fabricant: Whatever the turbulence in this place, 20 years ago in Tiananmen Square, according to the Chinese Red Cross, 2.500 young people had their lives snuffed out. Even this morning, journalists trying to enter Tiananmen Square were manhandled by the Chinese police. May we have a debate about human rights in China and how we can encourage the Chinese, who wish to become a modern country and a part of our modern society, to revise their internal policing and freedom policies?

Harriet Harman: Given that there are major human rights concerns that go beyond the roughly 30 people who, 20 years after the tragic events in Tiananmen Square, still remain in detention, it might be appropriate for a topical debate in the near future. Given the major human rights issues also arising in Burma, we might be able to combine the two and debate them together.

Robert Goodwill: On 27 April, the new motorcycle driving test, including the controversial 50 kph swerve and stop aspect, was finally introduced. During the first three weeks of the test's operation, there have been 11 incidents—10 involving injury—and three people have had to be admitted to hospital. Will the Secretary of State for Transport, whoever he or she may be by next week, make a statement so that Members can raise the questions that need to be asked about this particular disturbing problem?

Harriet Harman: I will raise the issue with Ministers in the Department for Transport and try to find out whether they believe a written ministerial statement or a letter to the hon. Gentleman would be the most appropriate means to deal with his request.

Julian Lewis: May we have a statement from the Leader of the House on the selection of topics to be debated on days when major elections, such as the European and county council elections today, are going on? She knows that I am a great admirer of the way she discharges her duty as Leader of the House and I cannot believe that she would have wanted the "Defence in the World" debate—the most important defence debate of the year—to be scheduled on a day like today. If she cannot resolve the problem herself, will she have a word with the leader of her party, whoever that may be, in the next few days?

Harriet Harman: All of us in the House believe in the importance of democracy, and we believe in it not just for the election of Members of the House, but for the election of local councillors and Members of the European Parliament. That is why there are so few Members in the House when local elections or elections to the European Parliament take place. Traditionally, that has been responded to by an effort to ensure that there is no controversial business and no need for a vote at the end of business. That means that we will be debating the important subject of the economy when few Members are in the House. There is an opportunity to look afresh at a lot of issues. If we think that there is no opportunity for serious debate in the House on election days such as this, perhaps the House should not be sitting. We need to consider that.

Andrew Murrison: May we have a debate about Gibraltar following worrying news that Brussels has begun to recognise Spanish claims to the Rock in assigning to Spain territorial waters around Gibraltar as an environmental protection zone that Spain is apparently to police? This has already caused a stand-off—between the British patrol vessel HMS Sabre and the Spanish corvette Tarifa earlier this month. Some urgency is involved in the matter, yet we have heard nothing from the Government.

Harriet Harman: In the provisional business, I announced for 16 June a debate on European affairs. The hon. Gentleman might seek to catch Mr. Speaker's eye to intervene in that debate and get a response from a Foreign Office Minister.

Mark Field: Amidst the furore over parliamentary expenses and allowances during the past four weeks, it has perhaps been forgotten that each and every day the Government are borrowing—not spending, but borrowing—£450 million.
	May we have a debate in Government time on this country's interdependence with a number of other nations, especially China, which my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) referred to, and several nations in the middle east? We have such tremendous interdependence to ensure that our bonds and gilts can be sold in the international markets, and that borrowing is being funded by other nations that have an important ongoing economic relationship with us. Will the Government hold a debate in their own time on that important economic phenomenon?

Harriet Harman: The Prime Minister and other Ministers have led the way in recognising that the response to the global financial crisis needs to be global. That is why the G20 summit, which the Prime Minister hosted in London, was called. In support of the extra borrowing, I would say that it has been necessary for the purposes of backing up the car industry and providing extra investment to help those who are going to jobcentres, and to protect many of the issues that hon. Members have raised.

Philip Davies: May we have a debate on organisations within the police force that undermine cohesion? We already have the deeply divisive National Black Police Association and West Yorkshire police has just announced that it is forming an association of Muslim police. I suggest to the Leader of the House that those organisations are extremely unhelpful, deeply divisive and do nothing to promote community cohesion and the principle of integration. May we have a debate on that issue, because many of my constituents and many people in my part of the world find such things entirely unacceptable?

Harriet Harman: It is important to ensure that there is proper policing that is as effective as it possibly can be, and that the public have confidence in and work in support of the police. That is only helped by having a police force that reflects and is part of the communities that it serves, which is why it is important to have more black, Asian and Muslim police. Therefore, those associations are important for increasing recruitment and diversity in our police services, whether in Yorkshire or in London.

The Economy (Supporting Business)

Topical debate

Ian Pearson: I beg to move,
	That this House has considered the matter of the economy: supporting business.
	British businesses are fundamental to our success and prosperity as a nation and supporting businesses through these tough times has been, is and will continue to be a priority for the Government. As many commentators have said, what makes this downturn different from those seen in the past is the fact that it is not a domestic problem, or a problem restricted to a small number of countries, but global.
	World gross domestic product is forecast to contract by around 1.25 per cent. this year—the first full-year shrinkage since the second world war—and many of our international partners are in recession. In the first quarter of this year, the UK economy shrank by 1.9 per cent. Across the EU, the fall was 2.4 per cent. Germany saw a contraction of twice that in the UK in the first quarter, and the Japanese economy contracted by 4 per cent.
	This downturn is hurting people and businesses, but the Government are not ducking the hard questions. We led the world in taking action to stabilise the banking system. We have put in place a £20 billion fiscal stimulus package to boost the economy. We have introduced a range of targeted measures to provide real help to businesses, individuals and families.
	As the International Monetary Fund noted in its annual statement on the UK economy, our response has been bold and wide ranging, and it has helped to contain the impact of the global crisis on the country. The fact that this downturn is global means that we need global action as well as action on the home front. That is why the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have worked with our international partners to ensure that we have a co-ordinated global response to the economic crisis.
	In April at the G20 summit meeting in London, agreement was reached on collective action that is necessary to mitigate the risk of an even more severe downturn while reshaping the financial system, preserving the world trading system and laying the foundations for a sustainable recovery.
	The London summit was an important step in the journey towards restored stability and economic growth globally, and the Government are committed to ensuring that further progress is made between now and the next meeting of leaders to be held in the US in September.
	Here at home, we have taken decisive steps to support the UK's financial system, given its fundamental importance to the basic functioning of our economy, and to provide real help for people and businesses.

Peter Luff: I hope that the Minister will still be in post this time next week so that he can give evidence to my Committee on the automotive assistance programme. Is he aware of concern in the automotive supply chain that the French and German Governments are giving much more direct help to that supply chain to protect it? Will he tell the House what grants and sums have been disbursed under the automotive assistance programme, and how many companies have been assisted by it?

Ian Pearson: I will come to the automotive assistance programme in a moment as part of the wider context of measures that the Government are taking, but I want to make the point to the hon. Gentleman and to the House that, through the fiscal stimulus announced in the pre-Budget report and the actions we took in October and January to support the banking system, we are helping businesses by beginning to replace the lending capacity lost due to the withdrawal from the UK economy of foreign banks and other institutions.
	This year's Budget went further in providing a stimulus to the economy as a whole, and in total we will provide fiscal support worth 4 per cent. of GDP in 2009-10. All in all, the UK has one of the largest programmes of fiscal support in the G20 in 2009.

Philip Davies: To help small businesses in particular, which are suffering a recession through no fault of their own, could not the Government take away, or at least suspend, some of the regulatory burdens to enable businesses to come out the other side? If they do not do that, they will be strangling those businesses, which will never have an opportunity to recover.

Ian Pearson: The Government have a strong track record in better regulation. At the moment, small businesses really want help with their cash flow, new customers and the economy to get moving again. The actions that the Government are taking are all designed to achieve that.

Greg Hands: Taking the Minister back to his point about boosting lending, surely he must have seen the figures released earlier this week showing that lending to consumers and businesses in the economy is at a low not seen since 1997.

Ian Pearson: Let me come on to lending directly. Although we have taken action, which has been opposed by the Conservative party, at a macro-economic level to provide a stimulus to the economy, it takes time to have effect. In addition, the Bank of England has reduced interest rates to the lowest level in our history, at 0.5 per cent., £125 billion of quantitative easing has been provided, and the current sterling exchange rate is highly competitive internationally. Those measures take time to filter through to the real economy, which is why help is needed now.
	If the hon. Gentleman wants to question me further about lending, I would be happy to take a further intervention. As he will be aware, a number of banks have announced plans to increase lending to households and businesses this year. HSBC will make £15 billion in mortgages available in 2009, and is allocating £1 billion in extra loans to small and medium-sized enterprises in the UK. Barclays recently said it would lend a further £5.5 billion to businesses this year, on top of a similar amount to individuals, and Northern Rock and several other lenders are following similar courses.
	As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, we have ensured that banks that have received Government support commit to freeing up credit as part of the contractual terms. As part of their participation in the asset protection scheme, Lloyds Banking Group and RBS have been required to sign legally binding agreements. Lloyds will lend about £11 billion extra to businesses this year and next and RBS about £16 billion, at commercial terms. That represents a significant pool of new lending available to business.

Greg Hands: The Minister is being most generous in giving way. A little earlier, he was claiming the credit for the independent Bank of England's cut in interest rates, yet most businesses will not borrow at 0.5 per cent. on account of the continuing large credit spreads in the economy. What does he think about long-term interest rates at 4.5 per cent., which is nine times the short-term interest rates? The rates available for businesses to borrow at, assuming that they can find a bank willing to lend the money, are far higher than the 0.5 per cent. he quoted.

Ian Pearson: I was not seeking to take credit for the actions of the Bank of England, which, as the hon. Gentleman is aware, is independent from Government. I was merely noting that on top of the fiscal stimulus introduced by the Government, the aggressive actions taken by the Bank, and the level of interest rates, are all big macro-economic factors supporting the economy at the moment.
	The hon. Gentleman is right to point out that interest rates are historically low, but small businesses in particular still find it difficult to access credit on terms that they find acceptable. We continue to have discussions with banks about not only the quantum of lending but the rates of interest charged. Banks must make commercial decisions according to their assessment of risk and creditworthiness, and a market adjustment has been occurring throughout the UK economy. I do not think what is going on in the UK economy is at all different from what is going on in other advanced nations currently.
	I want to mention the European Investment Bank and the onward lending to the small business community successfully negotiated by the Government. The UK's share of overall EIB lending to small and medium-sized enterprises has already increased from 2.2 per cent. in 2007 to 12.3 per cent. in 2008, as part of a four-year deal that has been negotiated. It is also worth noting the Government's enterprise finance guarantee scheme, which a number of Opposition Members criticised for being slow to spend, is proving extremely popular with businesses, and we are confident that it will support about £1.3 billion of bank lending to smaller firms this year. The most recent figures I have suggest that about £420 million of eligible applications from more than 3,800 firms have been granted or are being processed or assessed. More than 2,650 businesses have been offered loans totalling more than £250 million. The scheme is therefore popular.
	On top of that, the Government introduced the trade credit insurance scheme in the Budget. From May 2009 until the end of the year, suppliers are being given the chance to purchase six months' top-up insurance from private insurers, who are providing it on the Government's behalf up to an aggregate limit of £5 billion. That is real help being provided to business.

Peter Luff: rose—

Ian Pearson: If I may, I will mention the support for the automotive industry, which the hon. Gentleman raised. I will happily appear before the Business and Enterprise Committee next week to discuss the automotive assistance programme. As he will be aware, it has two parts, one of which is linked to guaranteeing loans from the European Investment Bank, and the other is a separate guarantee package. As he knows, Jaguar Land Rover has successfully applied to the European Investment Bank, and we will have discussions about the Government guarantee as part of that package. We are also in discussions with a number of automotive companies about assisting them through the automotive assistance programme. Given that the Government are providing guarantees, it is naturally up to the companies to reach agreements with the banks providing the loans, which the Government will guarantee. I hope to make announcements shortly about the AAP, but he will be aware that such deals can take a significant amount of time. When we are spending taxpayers' money, it is right that we take precautions. The team in place in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform is working hard with a number of companies in the supply chain, and we can make a real difference to some of those companies.
	The Government have also recognised that many businesses are worried about being able to meet their tax, national insurance, VAT and other payments owed to Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. Those businesses can call the business payment support line that we have we set up. About 131,000 businesses have now been given the leeway to defer tax payments worth more than £2.3 billion, giving them a significant breathing space during difficult times. On top of that, the Government and their agencies, as major customers for good and services that UK businesses provide, have taken steps to help to ease the cash-flow problems of suppliers, by committing to pay bills within 10 days, bringing forward an extra £8 billion of payments on top of the £58 billion already paid within 10 days.

Greg Hands: I think the Minister said he was worried about whether businesses would be able to meet their obligations to pay national insurance. Will he therefore tell us why he is hiking national insurance up by 0.5 per cent. from next year, for employers and those employees earning more than £19,000—a tax on the many, not the few?

Ian Pearson: The hon. Gentleman knows very well what we said in the Budget about the need to provide real help to businesses and the economy now, and to provide a fiscal stimulus, but also to take a sustainable approach to the public finances. That is why we have made announcements on national insurance, top rates of income tax and pensions. The Government must make a balanced judgment on the economy and its future and ensure that we put public finances on a sustainable path. That is what we did in the Budget: taking actions now that will help people and businesses get through difficult times, while ensuring a prudent and sustainable approach to the public finances over the medium term. That, Mr. Speaker, is exactly what you would expect Government to do.
	We are also setting out a strategic vision about how to provide more support to companies in the future, through our White Paper, "New Industry, New Jobs" and our industrial activism approach. That is important. We will continue to develop it, and I commend it to the House.

Greg Hands: What extraordinary scenes! The Government have called a debate on the economy, and the Chamber is practically empty. The Minister arrived only just in time to present the Government's case. I thought for a moment that he might have packed his bags in anticipation of the official announcement, and taken part in the DIY reshuffle that seems to have started earlier in the week. There appear to be no other Labour Members present to contribute to the debate. The Labour Benches are almost entirely empty: I see only the Whip and the Minister. There is no sign of anyone else wishing to make a speech in support of the Government's policy on the economy.
	The debate takes place in unhappy circumstances. I commend in advance all the members of my own party who are hoping to speak today, but it cannot be right for the Government to try to meet the widespread demand, in the House and the country, for significant time in which we can debate the economy by presenting us with a debate lasting only an hour and a half on election day, when an empty Chamber can be almost guaranteed.

Peter Luff: Would we not have been greatly assisted if this had been a substantive motion? The House could then have expressed its view, rather than merely debating the motion.

Greg Hands: That would indeed have been very helpful. The Government have been running away from any debate of substance on the economy for many months. It was only a full Opposition day debate on the subject in March that finally prompted the Government to call their own debate in the week before Easter. Apart from allowing the usual scheduled debates on the Budget and the Finance Bill, the Government have been running away from being scrutinised on the economy for the past six months.
	The Minister tried to talk about green shoots. It is true that the rate of decline in the UK economy appears to have abated in some areas. Manufacturing industry and the service sector are not as downbeat as they were a few months ago. Nevertheless, we have already experienced the longest recession in decades, and if there is joy at seeing light at the end of the tunnel, it is mainly because we have been underground for so long.
	We welcome any signs of improvement in the economy. After four quarters of no growth or negative growth, we desperately need some signs that improvement will come. We have always thought and said that growth would return in 2009, although we have questioned, and continue to question, the Government's growth forecasts for the years ahead. However, there are conflicting signs in the real economy. The Minister presented some of the highlights, which we welcome, but we should be realistic about the complete picture. Lending to companies and households fell in April for the first time since 1997. Earlier this week, the  Financial Times commented:
	"The slowdown in lending serves as a warning that while some 'green shoots' are emerging in the economy, constrained access to credit and weak demand for loans in the private sector could yet kill them off.'
	Unemployment continues to rise inexorably, and at its fastest rate since the second world war. The Minister's optimistic tone will not be echoed by the additional hundreds of thousands who are joining the dole queues each quarter. In March, the level of unemployment had already surpassed the forecasts for the whole of 2009 that had been made in the 2008 pre-Budget report. The Budget predicted that the claimant count would rise to 2.44 million by the end of 2010, a figure that had already exceeded by 1 million the one predicted only six months earlier in the pre-Budget report. The British Chambers of Commerce have predicted that it will reach 3.2 million by the end of 2010, and the CBI has made a similar prediction. It seems that the age-old adage—that all Labour Governments leave office with unemployment higher than when they took over—will prove to be true yet again.
	If I were the Minister, I would go easy on trumpeting claims for the success of Government schemes to help people and businesses through the recession. It emerged earlier this week that just two home owners had been helped by the Government's flagship initiative to help families avoid repossession. The mortgage rescue scheme has been running since January, during which time nearly 20,000 homes are thought to have been seized, but only two households have been helped.
	Let us consider two of the Government's schemes for business. I do not know whether the Government can provide more up-to-date figures, but the most recent publicly available figures suggest that the capital for enterprise fund announced in November 2008 has yet to invest a single pound in any business. Furthermore, according to the Minister for Employment Relations and Postal Affairs the £1.3 billion enterprise finance guarantee scheme has loaned just £92.6 million to industry, despite also being announced last November. That represents just 7 per cent. of the funds available. Meanwhile—and I hear this across the country—big Government rises in business rates continue to hurt.
	One easy way of helping small and medium-sized enterprises would be to make small business rate relief automatic. Why did the Government oppose the private Member's Bill presented recently by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff), which would have done precisely that? As I said earlier, however, the way in which the Government could really help business is by sorting out the public finances. Unfortunately for the Government and the country, the position is going from bad to worse. We are still deep in the tunnel, with no chinks of light to be seen. Government borrowing in April—in just one month—was an incredible £8.5 billion. That is a record, and it is five times as much as was borrowed in the same month last year.
	Even according to the Government's own highly questionable statistical basis, net debt has already risen from the mid-40s to 53.2 per cent. of GDP. It is at its highest level since the 53.8 per cent. that we saw when the country was shamefully bailed out by the IMF in 1976. The United Kingdom has been publicly downgraded by Standard and Poor's for the first time ever, or at least since its credit was rated for the first time in 1978. Our credit prospects are negative. That will add yet further to our borrowing costs, especially the costs of any non-domestic borrowings. It will also shrink the investor base for our debt products, as some investors are not able to hold anything less than AAA-rated assets.
	Thanks to the public finances, borrowing rates for businesses are far higher than they should be in this recession. As I said earlier, long-term interest rates are an incredible nine times higher than short-term interest rates. Credit spreads on variable-rate borrowings are still too wide. Whether we look at variable or fixed-rate funding, it is clear that the long-term funding needed by businesses is still far too expensive. Moreover, the Government are crowding out business borrowers from the capital markets with their huge gilt auctions
	It seems that no one believes the Government's forecasts of a trampoline recovery. We hope and expect there to be some growth in the economy before the end of the year, but it is difficult to share the Government's optimism that there will be a 3.5 per cent. rate of growth next year. Of course we would love that to be true, but we suspect some political massaging of the figures. Indeed, I read that the Prime Minister wanted the figures to be even more fixed than those that I have cited. On Tuesday,  The Times reported that
	"the Prime Minister tried to upgrade the growth forecasts to make the economic outlook appear rosier than it was; the Chancellor refused."
	We urgently need to hear from the Minister what really happened. Are the growth forecasts in the Red Book from No. 10, or are they from the Treasury? Did the Prime Minister try to intervene, as  The Times claimed? Perhaps he intervened successfully, and those growth forecasts are the result of his intervention.
	It would also be helpful to hear the Minister's response to the harsh criticisms of the Government's quantitative easing programme made earlier this week by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. She said:
	"What other central banks have been doing must be reversed. I am very sceptical about the extent of the Fed's actions and the way the bank of England has carved its own little line in Europe".
	That is another extraordinary attack from a foreign leader on the Government's economic policy. May I ask the Minister whether, at the G20 summit and at last month's ECOFIN meeting, Germany raised its opposition to the quantitative easing programme with the Prime Minister or the Chancellor?
	Although no Labour Members except the Minister are present for it, this may well end up being an historic debate. It may well be the last debate on the economy to take place while the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the right hon. Member for Edinburgh, South-West (Mr. Darling) is Chancellor. This could be how it all finished: a dead-end debate slot on European election day with virtually no one present to witness the end of it all. The Chancellor would be like a modern-day Eleanor Rigby.
	Instead of coming here to talk about the economy, the Chancellor is somewhere else fighting for his political survival. Britain deserves better than this, and that is why we are calling for a general election. I thank my hon. Friends in advance for participating in this debate, but the whole Conservative party wants to debate the economy, and for longer than an hour and a half; we want a full, four-week debate in a general election campaign. Moreover, a general election is what the country wants and so desperately needs.

John Pugh: I do not know whether this is a dead-end debate slot, but I do know that I have only six minutes to say all that needs to be said about the economy and business, and I also know how strict you are, Mr. Deputy Speaker, in enforcing such time limits. Saying all that needs to be said in such a brief period presents something of a challenge because relatively little has been said recently in either this place or the media about the economy and business. Far more has been said about the home economics of MPs. We live in a strange world at present, where a £5 claim for an offertory is given as much precedence in terms of newspaper headlines as was the attack on the twin towers.
	In a way, however, that might not be such a bad thing, because when the focus was on the economy, that led to a rush of Government headline-grabbing initiatives that were not well thought-through, and to the media ceaselessly attempting to pile on the misery, darken the gloom and depress optimism. Every statistical device known to man was used to illustrate that, when compared with the great depression of the 1930s, the black death and so forth, the severity of current circumstances was unrivalled.
	I am not trying to pretend that the economy is not in serious difficulties and an unexpectedly bad state, but I drew attention to the media effect on confidence in an early-day motion that I tabled some time ago. I called for that to be studied, because is it not a strange coincidence that some slight signs of recovery—of bottoming out—are arising in a period of relative media neglect? While democratic institutions are taking a hammering, the ailing economy is enjoying something of a media respite.
	I make this point because I was receiving a consistent message from my constituents a few months ago. They were saying, "Yes, business is in a fix, and we know that these are difficult, hard and tough times, but we could do without the media larding it on and exaggerating the extent of the depression." The local media do not do that, because they do not want to depress confidence unduly as they recognise that they need advertisers and that those advertisers are local businesses.

William Cash: Does the hon. Gentleman also recognise that when dealing with matters affecting our local economy, which is very important, the most important thing we can do is stand up for manufacturing industry and the people who really matter? We must protect their jobs and interests, and do everything we can to ensure that they can survive in the current difficult circumstances.

John Pugh: I do accept that, but I want to make the point that there is a big difference between how the whole issue has been treated from start to finish by the local media, which in a sense depend on local industry, and by national media, such as the BBC, which do not. I simply point that out. The effect of that may be marginal, but it is nevertheless real. Mark Vitner, senior economist of Wachovia, recently commented on the fragile recovery in business confidence in the US and warned that:
	"People's expectations were built on such things as newspaper headlines."
	Let me turn now to the main subject of our debate: the expectations of business. We are going through tough times, and there is an expectation that Government will help. In good times, good business does not need any help, but most businesses currently do. Genuine attempts to help have been made; the Minister listed some of them. The Government have pressured banks to lend and also to maintain credit, which is very important. They are also trying to create a more benign tax environment; there is some evidence of that in the current Finance Bill. They are spreading business rate payments, too, and increasing advice. More national and European grants are coming forward as well. However, much of the help is rushed, poorly communicated and, at times, ineffectual. It also does not address real and reasonable requests. One of them has already been mentioned: the automatic small business rate relief would not cost the Treasury anything, but it would be enormously beneficial to many local businesses.
	Businesses also notice that the help they are being given is incommensurate with the help being given to banks, who were the authors of the general misfortune in the first place, and who still pressure viable businesses rather more than businesses that are likely to default. In other words, they put pressure on businesses that are doing reasonably well and tighten their access to credit, because they know that if they put pressure on businesses that are likely to fail, they themselves will be the losers.
	Expectations are not being met, therefore, but then few expectations are being met these days. Few people expected the current economic mess, or the scale of it; few expert economists, global pundits or parliamentarians did so. However, that has not stopped everybody now rushing in to make further predictions with the same confidence as in the past. The best of the predictions do little more than encapsulate current trends. The CBI recently said:
	"Although we were deep in recession, the rate of contraction is slowing markedly."
	That still augurs that we are going to have increased unemployment, more bankruptcies, more pressure on public finances and a painful clawing back to prosperity.
	Fiscal stimulus, or natural retrenchment, may efficiently—or haphazardly—be working as an economic brake, although we recognise that there is a cost to that in terms of the public finances. The big problems, however, are structural, on both an international and a national, British, basis. China and the USA remain trapped in a Faustian pact whereby the productivity of one requires the indebtedness and refinancing of the other. The world financial system requires a remarkable revision, but it does not have the capacity to implement it. The British economy has similar major structural problems. Unlike Sweden and the Czech Republic, we have not learned to protect our manufacturing base. We are also grossly dependent on the footloose service and financial industries. We have not been filling the skills gap either, and there has not been any real attempt to square the circle, so to speak, of matching increased prosperity with diminishing social inequality. We are in a fix, and it is a structural fix. Unless we address these fundamental issues, we will find ourselves in a deeper fix still.

Nicholas Winterton: I am very pleased to have been called to contribute to this debate because during all the years that I have been a Member of Parliament I have fought for, campaigned for and promoted UK manufacturing—indeed, so much so that Members on both sides of the House have identified me as "Mr. Manufacturing Industry, MP." I have stood up for manufacturing industry under successive Governments. During the 18 years of Conservative government, I formed the Manufacturing and Construction Industries Alliance, which was a partnership between big and small industry, trade unions and all who believed that manufacturing industry is one of the only sources of non-inflationary, sustainable economic growth. I believed that when I first entered the House, and I believe it today, and I also believe that, sadly, successive Governments have often sacrificed manufacturing industry in this country unnecessarily.
	In my local area, I am at present deeply concerned that the largest employer, AstraZeneca, a world-renowned pharmaceutical company, is reducing its work force in both my constituency and that of my immediate neighbour and colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne), by some 1,500 jobs over a three-year period. Those jobs are not disappearing entirely, but they are disappearing from Macclesfield—both at the Hurdsfield plant and the big research development plant at Alderley park—because the company is transferring the jobs to China and Mexico. Why is it doing that? One might say that it is doing that because it is a global company, but it is also doing it because the cost of those jobs is much less in China and Mexico. Over the years the company has also transferred jobs to India. One may say that there is a good reason for it to do so, but the message I am trying to get across to the Government is that they should not increase the cost of employment and of manufacturing industry unnecessarily.
	The Government could take many steps at the moment to reduce the costs to manufacturing industry. It will see us come out of this recession, because things produced in this country at a competitive price and to a standard that people want, and delivered as such, are the real wealth creator, which should be encouraged. A smaller company in Poynton in my constituency, Aearo Ltd, owned by 3M, is sadly closing its plant there and transferring the jobs to Poland—again, because of the cost advantages of operating in that country. The Government should take these matters very seriously.
	I turn to a matter relating to the Ministry of Defence. On the periphery of my constituency is the BAE Systems facility at Woodford, where the Nimrod aircraft, which is on order for the RAF, is produced. I pay a huge tribute to the trade unions there for the way in which, over recent years, they have worked in complete co-operation with the management in order to produce a good aircraft to the MOD's delivery and specification requirements. Of course there have been problems in the past—about which industry would one say that there have been no difficulties between management and labour in the past?—but at this facility full co-operation has been given.
	The MOD has ordered nine Nimrods—the initial order was very much larger and it has subsequently been cut—but it is now looking, under Project Helix, for another three aircraft. I believe that the MOD's R1 mission system upgrade project could utilise the MRA4, and if it does so, that would extend the work force and the employment at Woodford for a further two years. However, the MOD is looking at the American Rivet Joint, which is a Boeing aircraft that is some 40 years old—these planes are currently lying in the desert, but I am sure that they are being properly maintained—and the thought is to lease three.
	I have met the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), who has responsibility for procurement, to discuss this matter. I have done so along with representatives of the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats, because we want to ensure that our expertise in aerospace continues. We believe that the MOD's R1 mission system upgrade project could be properly fulfilled by the MRA platform and that there is therefore a Nimrod MRA4-based solution to what the MOD requires. The Government can help, so they should retain high-tech engineering jobs in this country, rather than go to another country for purchases that can be fulfilled within our own manufacturing sector.
	Having made a plea on behalf of certain industries and companies in my constituency, may I say, as has been said from the Front Benches by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) and the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats, that despite receiving unprecedented valuable bail-outs from the taxpayer—the Treasury—the banks and other financial institutions are still providing little or inadequate help to hard-pressed businesses and individuals via increased lending?
	I have an interest in the construction industry, because I worked in it before I came into this House, and I understand it pretty well. In my view, it is market forces that have constricted the housing market, and not the financial institutions per se. I am not sure whether the Minister agrees with that observation. My view is that falling house prices are mirroring the economy at any one time, and those will correct themselves gradually once the economy has recovered. However, I stress that the lending banks and institutions must do more to help stimulate this country's housing market.
	The plight of small to medium-sized businesses is serious. They are the powerhouse of the modern economy, yet the commercial banks are still refusing to lend to struggling businesses. One thing that greatly annoys and frustrates me is that HBOS, which is now part of the Lloyds Banking Group, is refusing to lend to a highly successful, long-standing company in my constituency. Like many companies, it is going through difficult times and has cash flow problems, and HBOS is refusing to honour commitments to it. Having received huge handouts from the taxpayer, the banks, rather than merely representing their own interests, should seek to represent the interests of the economy of this country.
	As the Minister will be aware, small businesses often operate on their overdraft facilities, rather than on loans, which are aimed more at development and expansions. The Opposition have made some important proposals, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham dealt with briefly, and called on the Government to act to assist industry in a more positive way than they are doing at the moment. One action could relate to our proposals to cut corporation tax and to cut payroll taxes for small companies; we have also called on the Government to cut national insurance contributions by a penny in the pound for small companies with fewer than five employees. I know that those are small measures, but they are all valuable. On insolvency, small and medium-sized enterprises should be able to apply for a short breathing space during which they would be able to come up with a restructuring plan, rather than go out of business. We want to save as many businesses as we can.
	The Government have sought to act on prompt payment, and I give them credit for doing so. As the Minister knows, lots of small businesses provide goods and services to local authorities, with payment normally coming within 30 days. Some local authorities, appreciating the position of small businesses, have implemented a 20-day rule, and I warmly welcome that.

Mark Field: My hon. Friend will perhaps be excited to learn that Conservative-run Westminster city council has instituted a seven-day repayment rule. On his previous point, although much is said about the idea of trying to introduce a chapter 11-type pause in the insolvency regime, this country's regime is extremely flexible and administration provides that opportunity, instead of companies having to go towards fully-fledged liquidation.

Nicholas Winterton: I very much respect the experience of my hon. Friend, who represents Cities of London and Westminster, which, of course, is home to the core of the financial services in this country. I know the very close relationship that he has with those in his constituency, who are the powerhouse of our economy.
	As I was saying, some local authorities have implemented a 20-day rule on payments—I am delighted that Westminster city council has implemented a seven-day rule—and bearing in mind that local authorities are dealing with taxpayers' money, I am sure that most taxpayers are very happy with that sort of policy and I hope that it can be followed by many other local authorities. Just a few days can make all the difference in terms of paying bills and staff, and helping businesses to survive, so I urge the Government to approach local authorities to get them to adopt the shortest possible payment period in order to help business at this time.
	As I said in a question to the Prime Minister, there are currently 2.73 million manufacturing jobs in the UK, down 160,000 on the year and down from 4.5 million in 1997. Productivity in manufacturing was down 4.1 per cent. in the final quarter of last year on the previous quarter, and that compared to a 1.8 per cent. fall for the whole of the economy. The figures are from the Office for National Statistics. I hope that the Minister will recognise the true value of our manufacturing industries to the stability and future success of the United Kingdom. Will the Government seek to reverse the crippling £16 billion burden of constantly changing regulations and the £7 billion a year new taxes that they have introduced, which are a drag on manufacturing industry, making us less competitive?
	The Minister mentioned France and Germany, and I agree that they have had severe problems, mainly—and this does go against my argument—because so much of their economies is manufacturing based. While they do produce manufactured goods, they have no market for them if the country to which they sell them does not have the money to pay for them. We must not force more of our manufacturers out of business or into relocating abroad. When the economy recovers—as an optimist I believe that it will—we will need manufacturing.
	A new report out recently from Policy Exchange reveals how the Prime Minister's second spending spree is set to reach 50 per cent. of GDP—a stark figure indeed—and that is not because of the recession. The report also calls for an emergency Budget and a spending freeze. Government spending is growing far more quickly than in other countries, and faster than in previous recessions. This perceptive and important report finds that the surge in spending is not being driven by the recession. At most, it says, only 6 per cent. of the increased spending is going on public works, and just over a third is due to the rising cost of social security or debt. Instead of "investment", most of the increase is due to a decision to spend more on consumption.
	The report also argues that all budgets, except social security, tax credits and debt interest, could be frozen at 2008-09 levels, resulting in savings of £87 billion on the Government's current plans. I have considerable respect for the Minister—I know his background and I used to work in the area that he represents—so I say with some regret that the truth is that history has a habit of repeating itself, and yet again it is a Labour Government who have brought the UK to the brink of bankruptcy. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, the current Prime Minister squandered the growth that he inherited from the last Conservative Government and he now has to fix the problems that his Government have created.
	History shows that successive Labour Governments, sadly, always leave the country deeper in debt. The present Government will have doubled the national debt to more than £1 trillion, so that anyone earning more than £20,000 will have to pay more tax. Rampant borrowing and tax rises will make the recession worse and the recovery more difficult, because they undermine the confidence in the future that is crucial to the recovery of economy.
	I make a plea to the Government and, perhaps just as strongly, to my own party, which has not always been the best friend to manufacturing, although it does appreciate the role that manufacturing can play, to ensure that the measures that we introduce take fully into account the problems facing the manufacturing industry and the important role that it can play in the recovery of our economy.

Peter Lilley: Bill Clinton had a sign over his desk that said:
	"It's the economy, stupid".
	It was there to remind him that although people claimed that the electorate were interested in other matters, it was the economy that mattered most. It is the economy that matters most to the people in my constituency and, I suspect, in most other constituencies. Even the anger that has been experienced over allowances, and before that over bonuses for bankers, is fuelled by people's fear and uncertainty about their own economic prospects, and we should not forget that.
	The sad truth is that although the economy is the most important issue for this country and our constituents, the Government have chosen to have a one and a half hour debate on it on a day when the local and European elections are distracting our attention. Until a few moments ago, the Government had not even been able to persuade a single one of their Back Benchers to support their position here. That is an astonishing rejection by the Government and their supporters of the importance of the economy.
	The title of the debate also refers to "supporting business". The implication is that direct intervention by the Government can solve the problems of business. At the moment, the principal problem in this country and the rest of the world is a shortage of demand for all the resources and people available to produce goods and services. As long as the principal problem is that shortage of demand, merely switching an element of that demand through the tax system to be spent elsewhere will not alleviate the problem. Money can be spent on the automobile industry, but it will be at the expense of money spent elsewhere. That may receive support from people in the auto industry, but it destroys jobs elsewhere. It is only measures to restore the aggregate demand in the economy to employ all the resources available that will ultimately support industry.
	We should be considering measures that will restore the growth of demand and thus the growth of economic output and employment. In my view, the key to that is money. It may be an old-fashioned view, but money is very important. If people have money in their pockets, they will be inclined to spend it. If they do not have money, they will not be able to spend it. If they have inadequate supplies of money, they will save and scrimp to try to build up their money balances. If one person saves money, less money goes to other people, and the total output of the economy is not altered.
	I think that the Government had the right intention with quantitative easing. We need measures to boost the supply of money in the economy. People may think that that is an unusual thing for me to say. I am a longstanding monetarist, and many of my monetarist friends are suspicious about printing money, because it can be a cause of inflation—especially if too much is printed. However, if there is an insufficiency of money—the collapse of the banking system threatened to destroy money—more money must be created. That is why it was essential for the Government to prop up the banking system. If banks collapse they destroy money in the economy. In a developed economy, money normally comes from banks increasing their lending. That is what creates additional money.
	If I were to lend my distinguished hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) £100, I would be £100 worse off, he would be £100 better off and there would be no increase in the money supply. If he, however, were to go to the bank and say, "Can I increase my overdraft by £100?," that would create £100. There would be £100 extra in the economy—and when he spent it, as I am sure he would in due course, that money would circulate through the economy. Banks create money, but when banks are retrenching on their lending they destroy money. They call in loans and do not replace them, and there is less money in the economy. That is why it was necessary and right for the Government to do something like quantitative easing to ensure that enough money was circulating in the economy. It takes a little time for that to happen, but I think that it will happen. It might be part of the reason why we are seeing at least a slow-down in the recession and even some signs that it is bottoming out, even if we are not yet seeing a resumption of growth.

Mark Field: My right hon. Friend rightly points out some of the concerns about the level of quantitative easing. Given the amount of money that has been printed by the Government, much of which to date is being hoarded by the banks, there is a potential inflationary problem. He says "provided that too much money is not printed." How on earth can we possibly judge when that point is reached—when too much has been printed, or, indeed, is about to be unleashed into the economy at large?

Peter Lilley: My hon. Friend's question could be rephrased, "How are we to know when too little money has been printed, when too little money is available or when too much money has been destroyed by the banks' retrenching?" We have to make a judgment. The Bank of England spelled out what it thinks is necessary and it will do it in a series of tranches. It is not proposing a Zimbabwean type of inflation, but an increase of a few percentage points in the supply of money. In general, an economy needs to see the money supply growing by a few percentage points more than the real growth that one hopes to achieve. We need to get back to that, and as long as the Bank does not overdo it, that is sensible.
	By contrast, reliance on a fiscal stimulus seems likely to be less effective, and there is less scope for it in the British economy than might be desirable. If we started from a position whereby the Government had a very low deficit, or a surplus, it would be worth a try. It would be worth the Government's saying, "Let's give a fiscal stimulus by borrowing to spend." However, when a Government start with a huge deficit, any further increase in that deficit is likely to destroy confidence, and as a result, have a negative rather than a positive effect on the total level of demand in the economy.
	That is not just a theoretical point. The European Central Bank and economists from the European Commission have both separately carried out analyses of all the studies that have been published of attempts to use fiscal stimulus, in Europe and elsewhere, to stimulate the economy in the post-war period. They both show that on a majority of occasions when Governments have attempted to use the Keynesian weapons of borrowing to boost demand, it has had the opposite effect to what simple-minded Keynesians might have predicted. On half the occasions when Governments have boosted borrowing, that has led to deflation. On other occasions when they have reduced borrowing, even in a recession, it has led to a resumption of growth.
	That is not something that should be too unfamiliar to us in this country. We have had three major recessions since the late '70s. In 1976, the Labour Government faced a terrible recession with a huge and burgeoning deficit. The Keynesians among them said, "Let's add to it. Let's borrow even more, spend even more and try to get out of this recession." Unfortunately, there was a run on the pound and they had to call in the International Monetary Fund—the only time the IMF has ever been called in to a developed economy—and the IMF said, "Stuff that for a lark. Forget about Keynes. Just get your books balanced again, raise your taxes, reduce your spending and that will restore confidence and get things going." And it worked. I went to a seminar recently at which someone who was one of the Government's chief economic advisers at the time said that they were astonished at how rapidly it worked, and how rapidly the economy started recovering thereafter.
	In 1980-81 the economy appeared to be in freefall, with a decline in output. At the same time, there was a terrible deficit. The then Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, had the courage to say, "We've got to get the public finances back into order if we are to restore confidence and resume growth." Then 364 economists, led by the man who taught me monetary economics—or tried to, as I am happy to say that I did not imbibe all his views—published an open letter to the Chancellor saying that there was no reason in theory or in past experience to believe that if he persisted with his policy it could lead to anything other than an intensification of the recession. If we plot what happened, we can see that the economy was in freefall until 13 March, the day that they published that letter. From then onwards, a V-shaped recovery began. They were completely factually wrong. We know from experience that it can sometimes be right to get a grip on the public finances. That restores confidence and leads to a resumption of growth. The same applied in 1992.
	That, of course, is why the Government, despite all their rhetoric and talk about an additional fiscal stimulus, have not introduced an additional fiscal stimulus on top of what is already happening through the automatic stabilisers. They are right not to take that risk. On the other hand the German Government, which is in a much better position, ought to be increasing spending, borrowing and trying to get their economy going. Other economies that are in that happy position should do likewise.

Sally Keeble: As a simple-minded Keynesian speaking to a simple-minded monetarist, may I say that if the right hon. Gentleman looks at the pattern of fiscal support for the economy across Europe and the G8, he will see that, astonishingly, the support provided by the different Governments is very similar? The only variance is whether it takes place through automatic stabilisers or a separate fiscal stimulus. The pattern of support is very similar, and that blows a hole in much of his argument.

Peter Lilley: My argument was based on the fact of what has happened in the past rather than projections of what might be happening now. We shall see. It might provide an interesting test case if we come back in three or four years' time and argue it out. The hon. Lady describes herself as a simple-minded Keynesian and me as a simple-minded monetarist, but if we are both simple-minded enough to say that we should look at the evidence, we will see that the evidence is clear. The evidence is not just what I have put forward; the evidence has been put forward by the European Central Bank in its study of studies and the European Commission in its study of studies, and the conclusion they have come to is that on a lot of occasions the Keynesian stimulus does not work and has a contrary effect.
	I am relatively optimistic that a recovery might soon be under way, because we will see the normal inventory cycle reverse. When final demand for goods falls, as it fell after the Lehman effect with the collapse in confidence across the world, that is amplified as companies do not merely reduce their demand by the 10 per cent. fall-off in final demand but reduce their inventories, too. Back down the supply chain, the 10 per cent. decline in demand might become a 20 per cent. decline and then a 50 per cent. decline in demand for components. We have seen that across the world, and it is partly why the great manufacturing economies, despite the great strengths that my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) pointed out, suffer a particularly sharp downturn during that inventory cycle. It merely has to stop, in a sense, for it to reverse. When people stop reducing their inventories, that feeds back through the chain and produces a sharp rise in output, even if it does not go back to the level it was at before the crisis began. We may see that inventory cycle go through its normal process.
	My worry is more for the longer term. Again, I just look at the evidence. What evidence have we for what happens when a modern developed economy experiences a banking crisis and a subsequent recession? The only such experience that we have is that of Japan. It did many of the things that we have done, but in a slightly different order, and some people say that it did not do them fast enough. It managed to avoid the worst of a recession, but it had 10 years of sluggish growth. My fear is that if we do not get rid of the overhang of both public and private debt as speedily as possible we, too, may first enjoy something of a recovery but then have quite a sustained period of sluggish growth.
	That is why it is absolutely vital that the Government realise the supreme importance of getting a grip on the nation's finances. We face the most enormous deficit; it is unbelievably large. Effectively, the Government are saying, "We will borrow to finance the entire military, education and law and order budgets, and much of the health budget, too." If we closed down all the Departments concerned, it would just about eliminate the deficit, but I certainly hope that the Government will not close them down. We have to look for savings wherever and whenever we can find them.
	I can tell the Economic Secretary to the Treasury that I have been responsible for the biggest-spending Department in Government, and I have seen the problems and pressures of trying to control public expenditure from within the Treasury. The single most important thing, and the first thing, that one must learn to do is to say no. Until we can stop inventing new ways of spending money, we will not get a grip on the total imbalance between our propensity to spend and our ability to raise revenue through taxation. The Government keep adding to the burdens. I get summoned, as Members do, to sit on little Delegated Legislation Committees. There was one the other day that proposed spending an extra £120 million on some benefit for expectant mothers. Even the Liberals, I am happy to say, thought that the measure was complete rubbish and voted against it, as did I. Nobody on the Committee thought that the benefit would do any good to anybody. I am generally in favour of feeding expectant mothers every kind of nutrient that they could need, but there was no support for the measure, and it was badly timed and badly focused. It was a pure gimmick—but it will cost £120 million. The deficit is made up of thousands of £120 millions, and we have to get a grip on them and stop giving the money away.

Sally Keeble: There is clear medical evidence that if we support women during pregnancy, particularly with food, for which they need money, the outcome for babies is improved. In particular, doing so tackles the problem of low-birthweight babies, which is a problem in some of our inner cities. That measure is a practical way of tackling that problem.

Peter Lilley: rose—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Before the right hon. Gentleman responds, may I say that we are rapidly running out of time, and there are more hon. Members who want to speak? Perhaps he would bear that in mind.

Peter Lilley: I apologise for going on for so long. It was a mistake for me to bring up a detailed issue. There are clearly arguments in favour of the measure concerned, but at a time of national emergency we ought to be saying, "Not now." We have done without it for the past 50 years; we can do without it for the next five years. Until the Government learn to say, "Not now. No new projects or programmes. Let's get a grip on the ones that we have," we will not avoid the prospect of 10 years of sluggish growth.

Robert Goodwill: Despite the fact that Scarborough was recently voted the most enterprising town in Britain, and went on to the finals in Prague, where it was voted the most enterprising town in Europe, we have not managed to buck the trend of this Labour recession. Between April 2008 and April 2009, unemployment has gone up by 68.7 per cent.; that is 1,000 more people out of work.
	The biggest shock to our local economy was the closure of the two Greaves printing works. On 9 April 2008, almost 200 jobs were lost at the gravure print works, and on 30 January 2009, 200 jobs were lost at the finishing works. On the day of the European elections, people ask, "What are the benefits of Europe?" and some might answer, "Structural funding has gone into the former coalfield areas and into the areas where heavy industry is in decline," but ironically it is precisely because Polestar printing got a £6-million grant from the European Commission under objective 1 funding for its new print works in Sheffield that the print works in Scarborough has had to close. The law of unintended consequences has come into action.
	The building and construction market is dire. The second-home market for premium flats on the seafront is holding up reasonably well, possibly because many people cannot see the point of keeping their savings in the building society given the low interest rates being offered, and because of the worry that there may be inflation coming down the road as a result of quantitative easing. However, the market for residential property, and certainly new-build property, is very poor indeed. Given that people previously got 95 or even 100 per cent. mortgages, I suppose that now that they are being told that they need a 10 or 20 per cent. deposit, it is not surprising that there will be a time lag before people in rented accommodation come into the market, if indeed they can save that money.
	The automotive industry is doing better in Scarborough than in other parts of the country, mainly because the Plaxton bus factory and the Bluebird coach factory are selling to local authorities and to the public sector. Of course, the McCain chip factory makes the ultimate counter-cyclical product; there is nothing like a bit of comfort food during a recession.
	Of course, the lifeblood of Scarborough and Whitby is the tourism industry, and the weak pound is helping there, as people are choosing not to go abroad. As a result of the uncertainty, people are leaving it later and later before they make their booking. In fact, last year, I asked an hotelier in Whitby on a Thursday what the bookings were like for the weekend, and he said, "It's too early to say." People wait for the weather forecast on Thursday night, or even on Friday, before they go online and book their rooms. Fortunately, weather forecasts are more accurate than some of the Chancellor's forecasts in the Budget. For example, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury mentioned the fact that the economy had contracted by 1.9 per cent. That was announced by the Office for National Statistics only two days after the Chancellor had forecast a 1.6 per cent. contraction in the economy. In fact, Treasury forecasts are so consistently wrong that they are in the same league as Michael Fish was when he told us not to worry about that hurricane.
	I should like to flag up a couple of issues that affect the tourist industry, and they give another example of the law of unintended consequences. The first point is about the threshold for VAT registration. We are trying to make Scarborough and Whitby a 12-month-a-year resort, but all too often, when it gets to February or March and the owners of small guest houses look at their turnover for the year, they see that they are on the point of breaching the £68,000 VAT threshold. It makes more sense for them to close down their guest house and go to Tenerife for a few weeks than to stay open. It is a real problem. If they go over the threshold, they have to pay VAT on all the money that they have taken since the previous April. I do not know whether Ministers are thinking about how that could be addressed. Perhaps we will have to leave it to the next Government to try to come up with a solution to that problem.
	On holiday lets, bookings are up, but I am concerned about changes in the Budget that affect the holiday let market. From April 2010, income from holiday lets will no longer be classified as earned income; it will instead be classified as unearned income. One consequence is that income from that side of the business cannot be offset against income other than other property income. That affects many small farms that have invested in their farm buildings, and converted them into holiday lets. Those farms now find that the two businesses cannot be offset against each other. Also, income from such holiday lets now does not qualify as "relevant earnings" for pension fund contributions. Such holiday cottages can no longer be considered a business asset, and that will have far-reaching implications for capital gains tax planning. All sorts of reliefs that are available for business assets, such as roll-over, hold-over and entrepreneur's relief, will no longer be available.
	We know why the Government did that; it was because many people had second homes on the coast, or even abroad, and it was seen as unfair that they could use the cost of running those holiday homes, assuming that they let them for 140 days, against their income from their ordinary jobs, but the case of farm cottages is entirely different. They are a diversification of a business. Farmers do not stay in their holiday cottages, but the cottages are usually in the farmyard. They are an integral part of the steading. In many cases the planning permission given by the local authority or the national park authority means that those holiday cottages cannot be sold off separately from the unit. In fact, in some cases, land cannot be sold off separately from that unit. I hope that the Minister will look at that problem and make sure that we can do something to try to help the hard-pressed tourist industry in my constituency.

Mark Field: I agreed with my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) and, indeed, with my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) on the Front Bench, when they referred to the fantasy figures that undermined much of the recent Budget. The very idea that there might be 3.5 per cent. growth during the year after next provided the Government with a very convenient alibi with which to avoid making some of the tough decisions that they must make on public expenditure. Those decisions have effectively now been delayed until after the next general election.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham rightly recalled the emergence of the International Monetary Fund, as, indeed, did my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley). We went to the IMF some 33 years ago, and the big worry in many people's minds is that we will have to return to it. I suspect that, if we do go down that path, the Government will do all they can to avoid it happening on their watch.
	As the Member for the City of London, I believe that in the months ahead several pressing issues will emerge in our financial heartlands. As the Minister knows, two of the big four domestic banks are now all but fully nationalised. One of those, Lloyds Banking Group, contains what might euphemistically be called "assets" from HBOS, which engaged in a series of balance-sheet boosting debt-for-equity deals during the boom years in the middle of this decade. As a consequence, Lloyds Banking Group has large holdings in a swathe of leading UK companies. Doubtless, many such household names will require refinancing as the downturn proceeds, and their financial rescue will come from the taxpayers' coffers, for obvious reasons. In short, before long, considerably large parts of mainstream corporate UK could end up being effectively nationalised.
	We need to use some much smarter intelligence to nip regulatory problems in the bud. An enhanced role for the Bank of England is very much a part of my party's policy, but that development will have to be accompanied by the appointment of some high-calibre, trusted and respected professionals to the Bank's top roles. That in turn should be augmented by the emergence of prosecutors with US-style status to replace what I am afraid is an increasingly discredited Serious Fraud Office. Nothing less will restore the confidence of market professionals and the public at large.
	I fear that the banking bail-outs will turn out to be an expensive failure. Indeed, that has already been proved to a large extent, and I do not entirely agree with the earlier comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden. The lesson that we must learn is that any institution that is deemed too big to be allowed to fail will forever be prey to reckless risk-taking. If banks cannot fail, they cannot effectively be regulated, because regulation requires the eradication, not reward, of recklessness.
	I appreciate that, in the current economic situation, in relation not so much to banks, but to depositors, it is difficult for us simply to stand aside. However, the operation of capitalism requires corporate failure. It is not "market failure", as it has been articulated by many in the governing circles; it is a sign that capitalism is working properly and efficiently. The message that banks will not be allowed to fail serves only to make their effective regulation all but impossible, because regulation creates tremendous barriers to entry and therefore advantages larger corporations over smaller start-ups. The wisest policy option is to create smaller, more competitive financial institutions, and I fear that nationalisation, of which we may see more, leads us in precisely the wrong policy direction. The best form of regulation must always be open competition, and public ownership is anathema to that policy goal.

John Pugh: How do the Government create smaller financial institutions?

Mark Field: I shall come on to that point in a moment. One of the great mistakes that the US made a decade ago was to break down the Glass-Steagall distinction between investment and depositor banks. We must protect depositors' interests, but the core problem with the nationalisation of our banks is that bondholders' interests are now also preserved—at the expense of taxpayers, both present and future.
	My right hon. Friend for Hitchin and Harpenden touched on quantitative easing. I suspect that the current consensus that favours it will find less favour as this year wears on. With little evidence that the velocity of money within the economy is any less sluggish as the real recession takes hold, printing money in vast quantities increasingly seems like a last throw of the governmental dice when relatively little else has succeeded. My right hon. Friend is quite right that inflation is clearly not an imminent problem, but the unprecedented pumping of money into the system is certain to be inflationary as time goes on. History suggests that an unsustainable mini-boom may well be on the cards by the first half of next year, but I fear that stagflation—a toxic mix of inflation, rapidly rising unemployment and low growth or diminished competitiveness—will follow. Indeed, the commodities and futures markets already factor it in when pricing for the early years of the next decade. I suspect that the Government will not have seen the last of their recent problems with trying to sell gilts, either. In the City, there is a lot of evidence that many banks now hold vast sums of cash and are ready to reinvest in the market, courtesy of the Bank of England's policy of promoting liquidity.
	I accept that now that we live in a globalised economy, this crisis is certainly different in magnitude from any that we have ever seen. One of the grand old names of British banking, Barings, collapsed owing what seems like a minuscule amount, £780 million, only 14 years ago. Today, the Royal Bank of Scotland survives courtesy only of a £26 billion bail-out. However, we can learn lessons from the past. As I mentioned earlier, we need to restore the distinction between retail and investment banking which, in the US at least, existed for more than six decades until the Clinton Administration repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. At that juncture, it was regarded as outdated 1930's throwback legislation, but its purpose was to protect the ordinary depositor from high-risk, if innovative, banking practices. That protection now seems mighty apposite.
	How then do we deal with the toxic assets that banks still hold and find so difficult to quantify? Curiously enough, the UK has a pretty good template close at hand. The near collapse of Lloyd's of London in the insurance market, which has developed great strength in recent years, was avoided almost two decades ago by the creation of the Government-backed Equitas fund. That experience should be the starting point for the consideration of any further large-scale Government- backed rescue expenditure. In fairness to the Government, they have begun down such a path, but we should be fearful of the likely overall cost to the taxpayer.
	The nagging sense of insecurity that the spoils of globalisation are being spread inequitably will continue to grow among the majority of the UK work force, and it has the makings of serious social unrest. I echo the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield, because the hollowing-out of large swathes of "traditional" UK industry, particularly manufacturing, as employment has been exported to low-cost China and India, has not been accompanied by higher, middle-class and middle-income professional earnings, at least for those outside the gilded world of financial and associated services.
	During the past decade, the mirage of higher living standards was maintained only by the credit-fuelled residential property market. The sharp correction of that market has exposed the reality that, in recent times, international free-trade has done little to enrich, personally, at least, the majority of our fellow countrymen. It is dawning on many middle-income folk that the losers from the free movement of labour and capital are not simply the unskilled who are forced to compete with ever large numbers of immigrant workers; it is increasingly apparent that the generation that is about to join the work force will probably be less well off than their parents, not least because they will have to foot the bill for the economic unravelling that became so apparent last September. That phenomenon is almost unimaginable outside times of war and a shocking indictment for today's generation of politicians.
	On the political difficulties ahead, there is little doubt that, whichever political party wins the next election, tough and unpalatable decisions will have to be made on public spending. Even if the Government's own—almost certainly wildly optimistic—figures on public spending come to pass, during 2009 they will raise only £3 for every £4 that they spend.
	I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden that we must come to terms in double-quick time with the fact that, arguably, entire areas of central and local government activity should no longer qualify for public funding. The overall state of the public finances suggests the necessity for further scrutiny, even in areas such as education, health and defence, which in more economically clement times my party pledged to ring-fence. The issue of defence, of course, will be discussed in the forthcoming debate. Although there has been a marked improvement in school and hospital infrastructure in the past decade, much of it has been financed, off balance sheet, by the private finance initiative. It will need to be paid for in the years to come.
	I appreciate that the hon. Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble), having arrived slightly late, wants to say a few words, so I shall bring my comments to an end. In the past decade or so, we have lived to a large extent in the best of economic times; now, however, we have a big price to pay—and a much tougher era awaits.

Sally Keeble: I thank the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) for cutting short what was obviously a much longer speech; we saw him paging through it at the end.
	I should like to pick up a few points and make a few remarks to the Government on how to move forward. Despite the need for caution and care, and despite the caveats and risks involved in what the Government are doing, the Government's approach to dealing with the crisis is absolutely right and it has already spared a great many of my constituents a great deal of hardship. Without the Government's strategy, I am sure that many more of them would have lost their homes, or been at risk of that happening, and that many more would have found that that they did not have jobs either. Despite the difficulty of managing such a profound recession, I think that we will see the benefits of the Government's approach.
	It would be extremely nice to be able to discuss the comments made by the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) and the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster, but there is no time for that. I will, however, pick up on a couple of points. First, it is completely wrong to say that the quantitative easing is anything like the printing of money in Zimbabwe. The asset purchase facility, coming on top of the asset protection scheme, has been well designed to deal with the toxic assets and get money flowing in the private sector. It has been absolutely the right approach.
	If the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden is to lend money to the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster, I hope that he will conduct an honest assessment of the risks involved with that character, that he does due diligence and that he gets some proper security, because what caused the banking crisis were improper risk management, lack of due diligence and lack of proper security for the assets.
	The Minister is not going to respond, but I will make three points to him. First, will he please make sure that there is a report on the results of bank lending to business? Like other colleagues, I think that the situation has not been as we would like and everybody wants such a report. Secondly, will he also make sure that his Department does real work with the Department for Communities and Local Government so that public spending on housing goes to local private contractors and so that local councils can manage things properly and support their local industries? Thirdly, will he make sure that the Government take into account the impact of their spending and efficiency reviews on the wider economy, so that—
	 One and a half hours having elapsed since the commencement of proceedings, the motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 24A).

Defence in the World

John Hutton: I beg to move,
	That this House has considered the matter of defence in the world.
	I am delighted to open this afternoon's debate on defence in the world. Today more than 17,000 of our armed forces personnel are deployed around the globe, protecting our national interests and working with our international partners in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, the south Atlantic, Gibraltar, Nepal, Canada, Belize, Kenya and Cyprus. I know that all Members of the House will wish to join me once again in paying tribute to the contribution that each and every member of our armed forces makes to build a safer world on our behalf, and in acknowledging the sacrifices that they all make in doing so. They are truly outstanding individuals, and the whole country can be rightly proud of their professionalism and dedication to duty.
	It is right that, sadly, I should begin by offering my deepest condolences to the family and friends of Cyrus Thatcher, of 2nd Battalion the Rifles, who was killed on active service in Afghanistan this week. We mourn his loss and extend our deepest sympathy to his family.
	In April, I had the honour of attending the ceremony to mark the successful completion of British combat missions in Basra. It was, for me and many others, a deeply moving occasion. Our armed forces have achieved a huge amount in the past six years, including a transformed security situation in Basra and an increasingly capable Iraqi police force and army. Furthermore, they have helped to create a secure environment in which Iraq's new democracy can grow. After years of oppression by Saddam Hussein, southern Iraq now has the opportunity to fulfil its very considerable economic potential.
	The task was not achieved without sacrifice. The House will, I know, also join me today in paying tribute to the 179 British armed forces personnel who lost their lives in Iraq. We and the Iraqi people owe them a debt that we can never repay, and that is why we must honour their memory and care for their families. I am in no doubt at all that we have left Iraq a better place, and that we have made a real difference to the lives of its citizens. According to General Odierno, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, what the British armed forces have achieved in Basra and elsewhere in Iraq is "nothing short of brilliant".
	Operation Telic was not the beginning of our involvement in Iraq; this week, the Royal Air Force concluded almost 19 years of operations in the skies above the country. Whether it was strike missions during the wars in 1991 and 2003 and the protection of the Shi'a of the south and the Kurds of the north from the malevolence and violence of Saddam's regime, or the provision of support to ground forces and the playing of a vital logistics role over the past six years, the Royal Air Force has a proud record, in the finest traditions of that service.
	The combat mission in Basra was not the beginning of the UK's role in Iraq, and nor does its conclusion mark its end. As part of a broadly based relationship between the UK and Iraq, we are now making the transition to a different, but close, bilateral defence relationship. As the Prime Minister told the House in December, our future military role will focus on continuing protection of Iraq's oil platforms in the northern Gulf, together with training of the Iraqi navy and marines, and officers of the Iraqi armed forces more broadly. We are preparing to lead an officer training initiative as part of the NATO training mission in Iraq, but that, of course, will be subject to NATO reaching its own agreement with the Government of Iraq.
	In the meantime, as our current permissions for operational and training activities expired on 31 May, we have paused in our support to the Iraqi military in Iraq, pending ratification of the new agreement. However, our programme of training for Iraqi service personnel on military courses in the UK continues and is expanding. I very much welcome the Iraqi Council of Ministers' endorsement on Tuesday of a draft UK-Iraq training and maritime support agreement. Once that has been signed, which I hope will happen shortly, I will place a copy of it in the Library of the House in parallel with its presentation to the Iraqi Council of Representatives.
	As our relationship with Iraq enters a new phase, the main focus of operations will naturally shift to Afghanistan. As the Prime Minister has said, Afghanistan and Pakistan are of critical strategic importance to the United Kingdom and the international community as a whole. In December 2007, we set out a comprehensive approach to tackling the insurgency in Afghanistan. Building on that, in April this year the Government published our approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
	The 9/11 attacks demonstrated overwhelmingly the international terrorist threat posed from Afghanistan. We must never forget that that country was allowed to become a base for al-Qaeda to plan terrorist operations across the world.

Barry Gardiner: Does my right hon. Friend accept that the country of India, perhaps more than any other, has experienced exactly those kinds of terrorist attacks from that base in Afghanistan and, indeed, in parts of Pakistan? Does he welcome the fact that a new and very stable Indian Government have just been elected, and will he tell us of any prospective talks with his counterpart in the Indian Government to ensure that the bulwark of stability in the region that is democratic India can continue to help in what is going on, which is causing so many problems across the world?

John Hutton: I certainly do talk to the Indian Defence Minister, and I was able to do so particularly in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist atrocity. India is the most remarkable and vibrant democracy in the world. In my view, democracy is the best defence against extremism. However, as we know—our own history tells us this—democracies need to be defended. The atrocities against the Indian people—the Indian democracy—require a robust response from the Pakistan authorities, because there is no doubt whatsoever that those terrorist missions were launched with support and logistics from Pakistan. That has to be addressed. There can be no hiding place for those terrorists in Pakistan. We therefore welcome the steps that the Pakistani Government have taken to bring them to justice, but more has to be done for that crime to be addressed. Until that action is taken, tensions will remain unnecessarily high in the region. There is no doubt at all, in any part of the House, about our respect for the Indian democracy and our best wishes for the newly elected Indian Government.
	We have certainly learned our lesson from the failure in allowing Afghanistan to fall into the clutches of the violent extremists and ideological terrorists. We remain in Afghanistan to prevent it from again becoming an ungoverned space from which terrorism can be launched against ourselves or our allies. So our mission in Afghanistan is designed first and foremost to protect our own national security.
	The United Kingdom has contributed military forces in Afghanistan since 2001, and since 2006 we have played a key role in the south of the country, in the Taliban heartland. In Helmand, our forces perform extraordinary acts of bravery and courage every day as they confront the terrorists and help to protect the local population from the fear and reality of violence. They are training the army and the police to ensure that the Afghans themselves can develop a position of strength to withstand and ultimately overcome the terrorists who threaten their country from within, and to create a stable security environment in which the Afghan Government can build institutions and enable development to take place. Across Helmand province, town by town, we have seen that happen. District centres have been taken from the insurgents and are now thriving, with markets bustling and schools and clinics opening.
	Crucial to this success has been the development of the Afghan national army. The international community must help Afghanistan to build a capable and competent force that can take the lead on security operations. The long-term future of Afghanistan depends on its ability to manage its own affairs. In the three years that the UK has been mentoring the Afghan national army in Helmand, it has developed into one of the most battle-hardened and competent brigades in Afghanistan, with three of the four infantry kandaks and the brigade headquarters now capable of conducting operations with minimal support from the international security assistance force—ISAF.
	These achievements are producing tangible results. Only last December, Afghan security forces, supported by British, Danish and Estonian troops, successfully cleared insurgents from the town of Nad-e Ali. Since that operation, the provincial governor, Governor Mangal, who is doing an excellent job, has held the first shura there for five years; voter registration has successfully taken place; and bazaars in urban areas are open for business again, and thriving. But the most important thing is that since the initial operation, security in Nad-e Ali has been maintained by the Afghans themselves. Our military successes in Helmand have allowed the UK, working with the Afghans through our civil military mission in Helmand, to deliver support to the provincial government and help it to deliver basic services and be more accountable to the people.
	Rightly and properly, the Afghan people want and deserve the right to decide the future of their own country. We are committed to helping them to hold credible elections that represent the will of the people and demonstrate that the Afghan Government have the authority to rule. Security over the election period will be critical. That is why last month my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister announced an increase in troops from 8,300 to 9,000 until the autumn. However, the Afghan national security forces will lead on securing the elections; our role is to provide effective support to them. We are working closely with the Afghan national security forces, the Afghan independent electoral commission, ISAF and others to prepare for these elections. Voter registration, which started in October last year, has now been completed across the whole country. More than 4 million new names have been added to the existing voter registry. The fact that the insurgents have failed to disrupt the process so far is a credit to all involved, particularly the Afghan national security forces.

Bernard Jenkin: In the emphasis that the British and the Americans are placing on persuading the Afghan people to accept the Afghan constitution, are we not still in danger of imposing too much of a western style of government on to a country to which that is completely alien? Should we not be doing more to work for reconciliation towards more traditional forms of Afghan government in order that we alienate less the tribal institutional structures, particularly in the provinces?

John Hutton: The constitution of Afghanistan is a matter for the Afghan people. The current constitution has been supported in a number of important elections since it was adopted. There is no conflict between supporting the Afghan constitution and supporting the reconciliation process. I think that we are all in favour of seeing greater reconciliation, and there are different avenues and paths through which that can be conducted. Essentially, my view is pragmatic, not ideological. It cannot be said of the Afghan constitution—the Afghan system of government—that it is a thing of perfect democratic beauty; it would be naive and probably premature to imagine that it ever could be. However, the fundamentals of the constitution are decent and enduring. The right of free people to decide their own Government and to choose the people who govern over them is the fundamental characteristic of the Afghan constitution, and that is worth defending.

Bernard Jenkin: The problem is that the Bonn constitution was constructed perhaps rather artificially at a time when a large part of the Taliban community of Afghanistan was not involved. The whole Karzai Administration have little support among the Pashtun majority, who were excluded from that constitutional settlement. Do not we need to allow the Afghan people more collectively to reframe a constitution that is more in line with their own history and tradition?

John Hutton: The Afghan people have those freedoms. Ultimately, as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North (Barry Gardiner) as regards India, those freedoms are the best defence against the extremism of the violent insurgents who seek to replace the democracy of Afghanistan—imperfect though it might be, as I would concede—with an altogether different regime with no respect for human rights, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman and I would join forces in ensuring that that did not come about. These are ultimately matters for the Afghan people, who are now, fortunately, free to address those concerns themselves.
	The instability of Pakistan is also of increasing concern—it is very real and obvious. The threat to Pakistan posed by militancy and terrorism is very severe. Last year alone, internal violence killed 2,000 people in Pakistan. We strongly welcome the current action being taken by the Pakistani Government to address the terrorist problem within their borders, where most violent extremist organisations in Pakistan, including al-Qaeda, operate. Effective security co-operation on both sides of the Durand line is therefore essential for success. UK and ISAF forces would benefit directly from improved border controls that constrained the flow of insurgents in and out of Afghanistan.
	However, we must remember that Pakistan is rightly a proud and sovereign nation. It is Pakistan's responsibility to act against the threat of extremism and when it does, we will continue to offer our assistance.

Liam Fox: What discussions has the Secretary of State had with the Foreign Secretary about the potential for the new Indian Government to help the situation in Pakistan by reducing tensions along the border?

John Hutton: I have regular discussions with my right hon. Friend about that, and I am happy to brief the hon. Gentleman about our current thinking. There are opportunities for tensions to be eased, but the essential condition for that will be action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants in Pakistan who have still not been brought to justice. I am afraid to say that at the moment, there is little evidence that they will be any time soon. That would be a significant step for Pakistan to take, and we would strongly support and encourage it to do so.
	We should maintain our constructive dialogue with Pakistan's military and help them to combat the insurgency more effectively. We are also supporting financially the efforts of the Pakistan Government to improve the education of its population in the federally administered tribal areas, which is fundamental to removing the insurgents' ability to exploit local people for unbelievably horrific ends such as suicide bombings.

James Arbuthnot: I am very pleased to hear what the Secretary of State is saying about helping education in Pakistan. One thing that I have bemoaned in this country is that we spend only something like 2 per cent. of our gross domestic product on defence, but in Pakistan they spend only 2 per cent. of theirs on education. The Pakistanis need to consider that carefully, because it is extremely important.

John Hutton: I strongly agree with the right hon. Gentleman. It is ultimately for the Pakistan Government to address their internal priorities and how they wish to spend their resources, but there is undoubtedly a strong view that education needs to be addressed now. If it is not addressed in a co-ordinated and serious way, that will simply allow extremist organisations to take over responsibility for educating young Pakistani boys and girls. I am afraid that that will lead to only one consequence.

Barry Gardiner: My right hon. Friend is being most indulgent in giving way to Members of all parties. Has he had any discussions with the Pakistani Government about the release of Hafiz Sayeed, who was the chief accused of the Mumbai bombings and was in captivity in Pakistan? Does that not betoken a reluctance on the part of the Pakistan Government to pursue these measures with the vigour that we all wish to see?

John Hutton: I have not had any discussion with my opposite number in Pakistan about that, because those are primarily matters for my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary to pursue through the normal diplomatic channels. I am sure that if there were a representative of the Pakistan Government here today, he or she would say that the release was a decision of an independent judicial authority, and that it was the actions of the Pakistan Government that led to that individual's initial detention because of the allegations that he was associated with the crimes committed in Mumbai. Whatever the legal or constitutional position, there is no doubt that a very serious crime took place. Nor is there any doubt in our mind that Lashkar-e-Taiba, acting in Pakistan, was directly responsible for that crime, and action must be taken.
	Although current operations inevitably shape our defence posture today, I wish to concentrate my remaining remarks on how we can prepare ourselves for the future. We all agree that the world is changing rapidly around us and that we must be both well prepared for changes and willing and able to adapt to them. The UK has an active international role and presence, and we must take into account the global trends that will shape our future. Two trends stand out to me.
	First, ours is now clearly a more connected world. Increased globalisation means increased interdependency, and we must be open to that. Our linkages to the world are essential to the UK's prosperity and success, and this is no time for protectionism. But global freedoms and connections clearly create vulnerabilities—take, for example, the global economic crisis, the shared problems of insurgency, terrorism, violent extremism and the drug trade in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the emerging threats of piracy and cyber attack.
	Secondly, it is pretty clear now that we are seeing a shift in the balance of power globally. More states have a voice, through greater economic power or strategic importance. Decision making in the world will therefore be more complex and we will need more innovative approaches if we are to achieve peace and prosperity. We talk more today of the G20 than we do of the G7 or G8. China, Brazil and India all have increasing global influence to match their rapidly expanding economies.
	So what are the new security challenges that we face in this age of risk and uncertainty? We certainly face a new form of terrorist threat that is transnational and employs extreme and indiscriminate violence. Terrorists who claim to act in the name of Islam seek to pose an enduring threat to our national security interests. Tackling terrorist and other non-state threats is set to be the most likely use of our armed forces for the foreseeable future. That requires not simply a counter-insurgency response but a multi-faceted and multi-agency approach, with new capabilities that can help us in the work not just of security but of reconstruction and good governance.
	North Korea's recent nuclear test is another reminder that proliferation has major security impacts. Belligerence coupled with weapons of mass destruction capabilities has regional and global significance. In addition to states, the continuing risk that terrorists, criminals, or other non-state actors will get WMD technology is incredibly serious when we live in an era of mass casualty attacks and suicide bombing.
	The risks of weak or failing states are also clear. Economic and political weaknesses exacerbate factionalism and often provoke conflict. Supporting sound leadership in vulnerable countries and international approaches to reversing downward spirals of decay will be crucial. As the UK is an internationally engaged power, its domestic security interests depend on effective and efficient international organisations. If organisations such as the United Nations, the international financial institutions and the World Trade Organisation are to remain effective, they must respond rapidly to global changes. The same goes for the organisations that protect and serve the people of Europe—NATO and the European Union. They must all adapt the way in which they work and the speed of their responses. Because legitimacy is crucial to effectiveness, they must also change to give the rising powers a proper voice and influence.
	Given those enduring and emerging security challenges, it is right that there should be debate now on the changing characteristics of conflict and how our forces should evolve. Of one thing we can be certain: predicting future conflict remains notoriously difficult. Our experiences defy a single pattern. Yes, there may be a broad consensus that the threat of direct state-led military attacks against Britain is extremely low and will remain low for the foreseeable future, and we all celebrate and welcome that fact. However, states still pose threats to wider security in some cases, for example by acting through non-state proxies. Miscalculations by states in dispute with each other could also lead to conflict, and we could find that we are drawn in if our vital national interests are at stake. We ignore those risks at our peril.
	There is broad agreement on some issues. First, it is agreed that for the immediate future terrorists will pose the most frequent and direct threat to the UK and our interests, and that they will do so in ways that will continue to plumb the depths of depravity, using women and children as suicide bombers. Secondly, it is agreed that there will be a continuing demand for our forces to counter terrorism directly, and we must look beyond Afghanistan and apply the lessons that we learn from operations there.
	Thirdly, it is agreed that there will be a continuing demand for peace support operations from peace enforcement to low-level stabilisation, either following state collapse or to freeze or end inter-state conflicts. Some of those missions could involve the use of coercive force. Fourthly, it is agreed that increasing complexity is likely to be a feature of the future use of our armed forces. They are likely to find themselves operating together with a range of other agencies, building on today's concept of a comprehensive approach. Finally, it is agreed that there should be an increasing premium on preventive activities across Government, working with allies, partners and non-governmental organisations. The work that we are already doing with the African Union is a prime example, and we should remain leaders in that field.
	In all that, we should be mindful that the character of conflict evolves incrementally. Emerging nations will have more of an impact on what we try to do and "host nations" will be crucial, not only for the legitimacy of many operations but in playing a practical role in their planning and conduct.
	As an example of both taking preventive action and working with host nations, the Ministry of Defence has a programme of capacity building that extends to 14 states, including Pakistan. The security forces we train are successful in disrupting terrorist plots, so the benefits can be immediate as well as an investment in longer-term security and international relationships.
	An important trend, which complicates conflict, is that non-state adversaries using irregular tactics will be increasingly important in international conflicts—not just terrorists but insurgents, criminals, pirates and even disgruntled individuals conducting cyber attacks from their laptops. One practical example of how we are agile enough to counter those threats is the UK's leading role in EU anti-piracy operations in the Indian ocean. Hon. Members will have seen the evidence in today's newspapers of successful Royal Navy action against suspected pirates. The protection of the world's shipping lines is vital for the economy of the world as a whole—and to us, as an island nation, more than many. We will continue to play our part in securing the smooth passage of global trade—something that the Royal Navy has always done marvellously.
	Non-state actors often share motivations and aspirations and co-operate and combine to pose new threats. They are likely to change form to defy our efforts to tackle them. The role of intelligence will therefore remain crucial to identifying those variations.

Bernard Jenkin: Yesterday, a Ministry of Defence spokesman confirmed that a British frigate had intervened on pirates off the gulf of Aden who had rocket-propelled grenades in their boats and clearly intended to commit crimes on the high seas, but said that because they were not caught in the act, although the Royal Navy could destroy the weaponry, it had to let them go. Clearly, there is a deficiency in international law or its interpretation, or there is something wrong with our rules of engagement. It cannot be right that pirates, who were caught virtually red-handed, are let go.

John Hutton: I have a lot of sympathy with the hon. Gentleman's point. However, I do not believe that there is any deficiency in the rules of engagement—we are able to defend not only ourselves but the ships that we are there to protect, and if necessary, to use lethal force to do that. The decision was rightly made by the commander on the ground, operating within the rules that he had been set. We have an agreement with the Kenyan Government for transferring pirates whom we detain on the high seas to the criminal authorities in Kenya. That agreement works well and several pirates have been moved into the Kenyan criminal system, but we continue to consider ways to improve— [Interruption.] As I said, the decision was made by the commander on the ground, operating within the rules as he saw them. I am here to support him—I am not trying to do anything other than that. However, I am trying to explain that we reached an international agreement with Kenya, which applies to the EU piracy mission. I do not have the precise figures, but I will give them to the hon. Gentleman, perhaps later in the debate. Many pirates have been detained in those operations and transferred to the Kenyan criminal authorities.

Bernard Jenkin: I do not think that the Secretary of State is addressing the point. Why in that particular case did the rules of engagement require pirates to be released, not taken to Kenya, according to the agreement? What is the legal situation that prevents the captain of a British warship from detaining those people and handing them over to the Kenyan Government?

John Hutton: The hon. Gentleman suggests that the rules of engagement are the problem. It is nothing to do with them. The commander of the frigate made the decision about whether the evidence would support detention and therefore transfer of the detainees to Kenya. His judgment was that the evidence was not sufficient to bring the case within the framework of the agreement. I am not in a position to second-guess the commander—that is not my job, and I will not be an armchair general, thank you very much. I am here to support the commander's decision, which is perfectly reasonable within the rules in which he was operating. However, if there are ways in which we can improve such operations, we will try to do that.

James Arbuthnot: To what extent does the Secretary of State believe that commanders on the ground or at sea are constrained by their realisation that the piracy problem off the coast of Somalia is more of a land than a maritime problem? Until we address the causes of piracy in Somalia and the economic collapse of that country, we cannot deal with the symptoms in the seas off its coast.

John Hutton: Again, I have a lot of sympathy with the right hon. Gentleman. The piracy mission is clearly dealing with—in his analysis—the symptoms of the problem. We have to protect the shipping lanes around that important artery, so have no choice but to engage the pirates directly. Obviously, it would be better if solutions could be found to Somalia's internal problems. Some work on that is under way, although it needs to gather momentum. The position in Somalia is fiendishly complicated, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, but my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, other EU countries, the United Nations, the United States and others are trying to find ways of addressing the root cause of the problem, which is a classic illustration of what happens in the case of a failed state. There is risk of terrorist activity in the south of Somalia and piracy across the country. There are pockets of good governance, which give us a glimmer of hope, but a hell of a lot of work still needs to be done to try to get Somalia into a better position.
	If I am right in my general observations, the question for all of us is how we can best respond to the challenges. Clearly, we must first deal with the threats that we currently face; that is why Afghanistan is the priority for us and, I suspect, will be for some years ahead. The importance that we already attach to its many and interconnected security challenges shows that it is possible to achieve success.
	Adaptability and flexibility will be key attributes of force planning. We need to balance our investment in people, equipment and technology to ensure that we have forces that are agile and adaptable to the realities of modern conflict, provide battle-winning capabilities and support our units on the front line. I discussed that and other similar challenges with US Defence Secretary Gates in March when I was in Washington, and I look forward later this year to sharing our analysis of the lessons learned from recent conflicts, including Afghanistan, and what they tell us about the characteristics of future conflict, as well as what they mean for our bilateral defence co-operation in the years ahead.
	In response to the new threats, I believe that there are five obvious and immediate priorities for us. The nature of many new threats is such that our response to them will rarely—even primarily—be military. However, when force is required, NATO will remain the cornerstone of our security architecture and we must and will ensure that we can operate with our major allies and partners.
	Secondly, we must operate across a spectrum from major combat operations through counter-insurgency and deal with complex challenges. In our 2008 defence strategic guidance, we created a new military task, called military assistance to stabilisation and development—MASD—to ensure that we develop the capability to counter irregular activity and support stabilisation and reconstruction efforts. It is important for the House to note that the new task now formally recognises that UK armed forces should plan and conduct operations to help stabilise and reconstruct in those locations where the security situation is too difficult to allow civilian agencies to work alone.
	In practice, that means that we are and will continue to be involved in a variety of activities, including protecting civilian staff, training local security forces or working on engineering projects. It means that UK forces must have the capability to carry out limited reconstruction of, for example, local infrastructure. However, perhaps more often, their main military role will be to build a secure environment in which NGOs and others can operate effectively. Our work in Afghanistan to date demonstrates that that approach can be effective.
	Thirdly, we clearly have to prioritise within the resources available. That means managing risk—tackling immediate priorities and most likely future threats—and doing so using structures that are agile and capabilities that are flexible to allow our forces to be able to "stretch, surge and recover".
	In my view, our fourth and fifth priorities are international institutional reform and future capability. International institutions have a vital role to play in defence and security as in all other aspects of international policy. The essentials are sound, but we need the right military capabilities to meet the military threats that we face, whether they are from fundamentalist terrorists in Afghanistan or at the periphery of NATO's homeland area.
	When I met my ministerial colleagues in Krakow earlier this year, I therefore suggested that NATO needed a rapidly deployable force that could signal our commitment to the defence of alliance territory—we called it the alliance solidarity force—because no potential aggressor must ever be allowed to think that he has a window of opportunity before NATO can effectively respond. I am glad to say that that has stimulated thinking in NATO, and I look forward to receiving a report back at our ministerial meeting in Brussels next week.

Crispin Blunt: The Secretary of State is moving on from the issue of resources, but I should like briefly to bring him back to it. He has talked about the need to train local military forces to enable NGOs to operate in a much more benign environment when stabilising countries. However, does he think that the application of British resources between the Department for International Development, the Foreign Office and his Department is correctly structured to enable us to achieve the overall outcome that we want across the whole of Government? With so many resources now in DFID and with the problems that it has in applying them to military training, my observation would be that there is now an issue that we need to address. Does the Secretary of State share that conclusion?

John Hutton: I share some thinking in common with the hon. Gentleman. The conflict prevention pool is a useful innovation, and it is proving to be a useful source of resources, helping us to do some of the work in Afghanistan, for example. Have we got every nook and cranny of the policy right? Probably not. There is also the question of how much we are prepared to invest in such initiatives, which is a wider matter on which my right hon. Friend the Chancellor expresses his views from time to time. However, I think that we have the beginnings of a much better approach. It needs to develop and—let us be honest—it could probably do with more resources as well. However, there will be an opportunity to look at such issues in future spending rounds, and I very much hope that it is taken. By the way, I should also inform the hon. Gentleman that I have not finished talking about resources—I am coming back to that subject.
	We will always, rightly, look to NATO for collective defence, but I believe strongly that the European Union can play its part too, using armed forces alongside its civilian capabilities. That is not about duplicating what NATO can do. Indeed, the real problem is that European countries have too few defence capabilities, not too many. I want to see Europeans developing more capability that they can put at the service of NATO or the European Union. I want to see Europeans taking more responsibility for solving the world's problems, whether through NATO or the European Union. I also want the European Union to show what it can do when it focuses on outcomes rather than institutions, as it has done in countering piracy in the gulf of Aden and off the coast of Somalia, for example.
	In sum, we need organisations that can respond, recognise the nature of a risk when it appears, think rapidly and imaginatively across boundaries, flex resources to where they are needed and work in partnership to implement solutions. I hope that we can leave behind the old yah-boo anti-Europeanism that has bedevilled debates on the subject in the past, because it does not advance our national security interests. Instead, it hinders them.
	As for our capability, I would mention just two emerging priorities. We will need to build and maintain an advantage over our adversaries in information and decision making. Advanced forms of collection, including through unmanned aerial vehicles, should be integrated in our forces and not just seen as an additional luxury. We will also need to develop capabilities that protect our information networks from increasingly sophisticated attacks. Such non-kinetic attacks on our vital infrastructure from cyberspace are clearly attractive to our adversaries, and we have got to counter them. How we decide on the appropriate capabilities and how we acquire them on time and on budget will be vital to the success of our armed forces in defeating the threats that we now face and might face in future.
	Today we do not just have to plan for contingent threats against a sophisticated state adversary, where the practical implications of our planning assumptions are tested in large part by their deterrence effect. As the past decade has instead proved, today our armed forces are engaged in less conventional, counter-insurgency and peace enforcement operations in defence of our national security, so now our planning assumptions are tested in the heat of battle, with no room for delay or failure. Every one of our servicemen and women has the right to know that we are doing everything possible to ensure that every pound of investment in our equipment programme goes towards the front line and is not wasted in inefficient or weak processes of acquisition.
	That is why I asked Bernard Gray in December last year to conduct a detailed examination of progress in implementing the MOD's acquisition change programme, as I hope right hon. and hon. Members will recall. I have to be satisfied that the current programme of change is sufficient to meet the challenges of the new combat environment that we now face. To date, I am not. I expect to receive the report shortly. Bernard Gray has conducted a thorough and wide-ranging analysis. I am confident that when his report is published, it will be both honest about the scale of the task that confronts us and clear in describing a detailed and radical blueprint to reform the process of acquisition in the MOD from top to bottom. That is something that we must get right. There can be no room for complacency, and given the current tempo of operations, we have no choice but to act with urgency. I will publish Bernard Gray's report before the summer recess, and I will come to the House again to outline the Government's response to it.
	Given the size of the challenge that we face, I am in no doubt whatever that change must happen and that it must be radical. There must be changes to the system and structure of acquisition process, changes to the incentives that drive and determine behaviours—behaviours that have often led to waste, delay and efficiency, bedevilling the efforts of both Labour and Conservative Governments over a long period—and changes to the skills sets of those involved in acquisition. I am committed to doing everything that I can to make it possible for our armed forces to be better served, and I will make future announcements in due course.
	Most members of today's armed forces joined after 9/11, in the new security environment that it created. That is the context in which they have always experienced operations. Their language is that of counter-insurgency and their primary enemy is the terrorist in civilian clothing, indistinguishable from the civilians he mingles with—the terrorist who threatens not just our people, but our friends and allies across the world. Our edge in defeating that threat is acquired in the training that our people receive and the equipment that they use, which is second to none, backed up by satellite bandwidth or a UAV controlled from thousands of miles away. We must ensure that our policies, systems and capabilities reflect today's realities, so that those who serve today are given the best support possible. However, we will fail those who will serve us in years to come if we fail to plan now for tomorrow's emerging threats. I will not allow that to happen.

Liam Fox: May I add my tribute on behalf of all my Conservative colleagues to the military personnel and civilians from this country who have been killed or injured, including Cyrus Thatcher? They have sacrificed themselves for our safety. There is not a man, woman or child in this country who does not owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of all those who have made that sacrifice on our behalf.

Philip Davies: Will my hon. Friend give way?

Liam Fox: No, I will not.
	It says everything about the priorities of the current Government and their business managers that the annual debate on defence in the world is squeezed by a topical debate, on a day when they knew that most MPs would be away from the House. I can just hear the Government business managers asking, "What subject is so unimportant that we can stick it in the Commons on polling day for the European and local elections?" and the answer coming back, "Why not defence in the world? It's only about Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest—nothing terribly important." It leaves most of us on the Conservative Benches virtually speechless that a debate of such importance to our national interest, the well-being of our armed forces and the morale of their families should have its annual slot reduced to less than four hours.
	In the year since we last held this debate the world has become a more, not less, dangerous place. Nine thousand British troops in Afghanistan are engaged in some of the heaviest fighting since the Korean war. As our ground troops come home from Iraq, the mission of the Royal Navy is now in question because the Government have failed to secure a legal mandate with Baghdad. Russia is rearming, and still occupying Abkhazia and South Ossetia—with illegitimate elections recently having been held in the latter—and it has threatened to militarise the Arctic region, to the great concern of our close allies in NATO, especially Norway and Canada.
	Piracy is running rife, not only off the horn of Africa but in less mentioned places such as the gulf of Guinea and the strait of Molucca. NATO is struggling to find its way in the 21st century, and the EU is aiming to increase its defence integration. Iran, in an unprecedented move, recently deployed six warships to the gulf of Aden, is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon, and in eight days' time will hold presidential elections that will have a huge impact on future policy.
	The Taliban were recently operating within 60 miles of Islamabad, and as I speak, Pakistani security forces are heavily engaged in offensive operations across the north west frontier and the federally administered tribal areas. North Korea has tested its second nuclear bomb, is preparing another long-range missile test, and has torn up the armistice that brought an end to the 1950-1953 Korean war.
	The British armed forces are participating in about 15 NATO, EU, United Nations and OSCE operations around the globe, and we have a military presence in the form of 41,000 British troops in 32 countries and overseas territories. It is against that backdrop that the Government have decided to hold a debate on this subject today, meaning that, for obvious reasons, it will be poorly attended in the House and go largely unreported in the press. The real tragedy is that we need more, not less, understanding among the British public of the threats to our wider national security.
	When we think about Operation Telic and the presence of British forces in Iraq, we mainly think about the contribution of our ground forces—and let us make no mistake: the men and women serving in our Army and the Royal Air Force have contributed bravely and professionally to make Iraq a better place. I associate myself with all the Secretary of State's comments about the huge and historic role that they have played in contributing to the future well-being of that country.
	Recently, however, the focus has been placed increasingly on the Royal Navy and the outstanding work that it has been doing in training the Iraqi navy and protecting Iraqi oil platforms. I say "has been doing" because, as has been reported this week and confirmed by the Government, the British and Iraqi Governments have failed to finalise a deal to enable the remaining British forces in Iraq to continue to train their Iraqi counterparts after last Sunday. Consequently, there are about 700 UK soldiers and sailors without a legal mandate in Iraq who are unable to carry out their training mission with the Iraqi navy.
	Furthermore, it is rumoured—I would welcome Government confirmation of this—that at least two British warships have been removed from the combined taskforce 158, which provides security for Iraqi oil platforms and ports in the northern Persian gulf, the economic lifeblood of Iraq that they have been asked to protect. This has forced an additional and unexpected burden on to our allies in the region, who are having to fill the gap. This applies most notably to the Americans, who claim not to have the resources available to meet this requirement. Our Navy has an extremely important role in the Gulf, and it is extremely well respected in the region by our allies. I would say to all those who talk about a lack of respect in the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom that they ought to go and talk to those serving in the American fifth fleet. They would find out just how highly those people regard the Royal Navy and how important its contribution is in that part of the world.
	It is unacceptable to have up to 700 British service personnel without a legal mandate in Iraq, especially when that has a negative impact on our relationship with the US. The Government should have sorted this issue out during President Maliki's recent visit to London in April. At that time, they were upbeat about what might happen, and the Secretary of State has been relatively upbeat today, but we should not really have reached this point, should we?

John Hutton: No, we should not have reached this point. Unfortunately we have, but I can assure the hon. Gentleman and the House that that is not for the want of trying by Her Majesty's Government. I want to make it quite clear, however, that the position that he described with regard to the lack of a legal mandate is not accurate. The legal mandate for the UK forces' presence in Iraq expires on 31 July. It is true that our mandate to conduct operational and training activities expired on 31 May, but it is not the case that the remaining UK forces in Afghanistan lack jurisdiction or effective protection under the agreements that we have with the Iraqi Government.

Liam Fox: I am grateful for that clarification—although I am sure that the Secretary of State meant to say "Iraq", not "Afghanistan". That is reassuring, but it does not get away from the fact that we have failed to reach agreement on a matter that is of great importance not only to our armed forces but to our allies.
	What about the so-called British legacy in Iraq that we have heard so much about? The last time we heard about this matter from the Government in the House, we were told that there were only four locally hired contractors representing British trade interests in Iraq, all of whom were apparently based in Baghdad, leaving Iraq's second city, Basra, and the northern city of Irbil completely neglected. As I have said in the House before, and as echoed by many of my right hon. and hon. Friends, our lack of trade presence means that we may have shed blood for Iraq, but stand little chance as a country of benefiting from the contracts flowing from Iraq's fiscal surplus. There is a lot of potential for Iraq to become a regional financial and trading hub, and we must do all we can to ensure that that becomes a reality. A stable and prosperous Iraq, as the Secretary of State says, is in all our interests, but a strong UK role in supporting this is also in both our interests.
	I now turn to Afghanistan. As we head into the summer months, and leading up to the presidential election, our forces are confronting a resurgent Taliban across most of the country. Compared with this time last year, there has been a 55 per cent. increase in coalition deaths. IED—improvised explosive device—events are up by 80 per cent. and there has been a 90 per cent. increase in attacks on the Afghan Government. Since January there have been more than twice the number of insurgent-initiated attacks in Helmand than in Kandahar, the province with the next highest number attacks.
	It has been said by many that the No. 1 objective of any counter-insurgency campaign is to protect the local population. This was accomplished against all the odds in Iraq, thanks to the clear views of General Petraeus, and one aspect of the Iraq surge can be, and needs to be, replicated in Afghanistan. I understand, of course, that there are no direct parallels, but there are undoubtedly lessons to learn from the other experience.
	One lesson that needs to come across to the British public is that 80 per cent. of the civilian deaths in Afghanistan are caused by the Taliban, not by coalition forces. While that does not excuse civilian deaths, and demonstrates that we are still unable to protect the local population in the way that we would like, there is a story here that needs to be told. There is a misrepresentation in some foreign media that our forces are systematically targeting and killing Afghan civilians, which could not be further from the truth. Unlike the Taliban, our troops do everything possible to minimise the threats to civilians. It is a point that our own media should focus on a lot more, because in this political environment we must not allow negative stereotypes to be created by default, which is a risk we are running. As the incoming American commander, Lieutenant-General McChrystal, said during his Senate confirmation hearing this week,
	"The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed, it will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence."
	That is the difference between us in this conflict.
	On my last trip to Helmand in March, I was pleased to find a renewed shift of emphasis from the central Government in Kabul to more focus on provincial and district governments across all of Afghanistan. The problem of governance in the country, including widespread corruption, must be tackled because it is undermining our efforts to achieve stability. Focus needs to be placed on empowering local and district governments. Local solutions for local problems has been the only way in most of Afghanistan for thousands of years, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) said in an earlier intervention. To believe that we can have working democratic central Government without first having working local government is naïve, especially when in many cases we are dealing with tribal codes that pre-date even Islam.
	I think most would agree with the Government that everything must be done to build the capability of Afghan security forces. The Afghan national army has come a very long way and is probably the most respected governmental institution in the country, although it still has some way to go. The Afghan national police, on the other hand, are viewed by the majority of Afghan citizens as incompetent and corrupt, and will continue to present the biggest challenge to the west, particularly in terms of capacity building, for some time to come.
	While we are on the subject of Afghan security forces, will the Secretary of State take today's opportunity to expand on the comments of his right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who said on 29 April that
	"as the US moves in, we will over time shift the balance of our operations away from front-line combat and towards an enhanced contribution to training both the army in Afghanistan and its police."—[ Official Report, 29 April 2009; Vol. 491, c. 870.]?
	Will the Government provide us today with some idea of a timeline? Will the number of British troops stay the same as this shift of operations occurs? I am sure that the whole House would be interested to know what mission UK forces in Helmand province will have after the 10,000 US marines are deployed there. How will we avoid ending up with what ultimately might be called "Charge of the Knights syndrome", with a small force, dwarfed by the Americans territorially and numerically, that is less and less in control of events?
	The problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan are increasingly recognised as being inseparable. We cannot achieve stability and security in Afghanistan until we disrupt the Taliban/al-Qaeda network attacking from Pakistan. Just across the border from our forces, Pakistan faces an existential threat from Islamist extremism. Unfortunately for Pakistan and the west, it is a threat that Pakistan is ill-equipped to fight. The Pakistani armed forces are trained, resourced and manned for state-on-state warfare against a perceived threat from India. I welcome the Secretary of State's comments on that subject.
	About 65 per cent. of the Pakistani military is Punjabi, yet the area along the border where the military is operating is predominantly Pashtun. To all intents and purposes, members of the Pakistani military are regarded as foreigners in the federally administered tribal areas and their presence can at times exacerbate the situation. Although we must train and equip the Pakistani military for counter-insurgency operations, we must do all we can to build Pakistani capability in the round, especially in policing and the Frontier Corps in FATA.
	Lastly, will the Secretary of State update the House on how many of the 5,000 NATO troops promised at Strasbourg have arrived in Afghanistan? They were promised ahead of the presidential elections in August, which are only a couple of months away. There has been little mention of the status of those troops, or of how many of those promised have arrived on the ground.
	Failure in Afghanistan cannot be an option, for two reasons. First, it could mean the effective end of the NATO alliance. What would happen to our credibility and to the cohesion of NATO if we were seen to have failed our first major test since the end of the cold war? Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, a defeat of western forces in Afghanistan would act as a shot in the arm for all Islamic fundamentalists worldwide. To every jihadist, it would be a sign of weakness in our resolve. Neither outcome can be acceptable to us.
	At the weekend I visited Hong Kong and Singapore, where one very different security topic dominated the media. North Korea's detonation on 25 May of its second nuclear bomb was a clear breach of UN Security Council resolution 1718. Here in London, there is a tendency to sit back and watch events unfold in North Korea as if there was no impact on the national interests of the United Kingdom and in the hope that others, such as the US and China, will take care of matters. However, the truth is that, like it or not, we are affected by events in North Korea.
	Last week at the International Institute for Strategic Studies Shangri-La Asian security conference, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said:
	"North Korea's nuclear programme and actions constitute a threat to regional peace and security."
	All in the House could endorse that statement. The transfer of nuclear weapons or material to other nations or non-state actors should be viewed as a threat to the security of this country, our allies and our wider global interests. North Korea is notoriously unpredictable, and at the moment its motives and the likely next steps are extremely unclear. The North Korean regime has sold missile technology to Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria. Consequently, it is not irrational to believe that future sales by North Korea might include nuclear technology and know-how.
	That nuclear threat is being mirrored in the middle east by Iran, in another clear breach of international law. I have heard voices on both sides of the House say that we should learn to accommodate Iran as a nuclear weapons state. I believe that there are three reasons why we must not. The first is the nature of the regime itself, and the second the willingness of Iran to destabilise its neighbours via Hezbollah and Hamas. We have seen their involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Do we want fissile material added to that mix?
	Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are all likely to want to follow suit. Our failure to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions will inevitably lead to the potential for a nuclear arms race, with all the costs, dangers and futility that that would bring. Surely we want to leave something better to the next generation than a nuclear arms race in the world's most unstable region.
	I first raised the issue of Arctic security in last year's debate on defence in the world, and I remember hearing laughter from Labour Members, including some who now speak on defence matters from the Front Bench. Since then the topic of Arctic security has become well reported in the press and has been the subject of countless articles in military journals. Two of our close NATO allies have explicitly said that the Arctic region remains their greatest security challenge. According to the Canadians, Arctic security is listed as No. 1 of Canada's six core military missions. The security of what the Norwegians call their high north is the top policy concern for our allies in Norway, too.
	We will all face many challenges in the Arctic as the ice melts and the scramble for resources heats up. With ice melting there, and increased piracy in shipping lanes in warmer climates, the shorter shipping routes in the high north will become more appealing. Already more than 11 million tonnes of oil per year pass through the Barents sea alone. As a leader in NATO, and because 95 per cent. of British international trade in goods travels by sea, we are forced to take an active interest in Arctic security matters.
	Many agree that NATO, as Europe's No. 1 guarantor of security, has an important role in the Arctic, and of course we must agree, as four of the five Arctic powers are members of NATO. Another reason why NATO must take the Arctic seriously is that Russia takes it seriously. It is a not very widely commented on fact that back in March this year Moscow released a strategy paper outlining Russia's plans to create a new military force to protect its interests in the disputed Arctic. The paper said that the Arctic must become Russia's "top strategic resource base" by 2020.
	Russian military involvement in the Arctic, including ground, air and maritime capabilities, is already quite prevalent. It has been reported that Russia has two fully equipped brigades, considered by some to be the best equipped brigades in the Russian army, stationed along the 120-mile border with Norway. Russian air patrols have increased in recent years and are now at peak cold war levels. When Russian bombers fly down the Norwegian coast and reach the city of Bodø, where Norwegian F-16s are based for NATO air patrols, they can be tracked practising bombing runs out at sea before continuing with their patrols.
	Russia's northern fleet is considered the largest and most powerful of Russia's four naval fleets. About two thirds of all the Russian navy's nuclear force is based within the northern fleet. It also has Russia's only operating aircraft carrier. To add to the capabilities of the northern fleet, there are plans to increase the number of nuclear-powered ice breakers, including the world's largest, at a time when our only ice breaker, HMS Endurance, is being towed back to the United Kingdom with an uncertain future.
	To put matters in perspective, although a direct military confrontation between western forces and Russia in the Arctic is highly unlikely, there is certainly scope for misunderstanding, which could escalate tensions, and that is what we must try to avoid. We need to find ways of minimising friction and improving dialogue. Perhaps NATO could be used as a way to increase awareness and co-operation with Russia in the Arctic region—especially in areas of mutual concern such as search and rescue. Unlike in the rest of Russia, in the Barents region of Russia the view of NATO is very positive, with up to 70 per cent. of those polled supporting NATO having a role in the Arctic. The outlook is not entirely bleak, but both sides will have to show a willingness to co-operate.
	Since our last debate, one of the trends has been the growing awareness of maritime threats. Somali pirates are currently causing chaos off the coast of Africa in the gulf of Aden—one of the world's busiest shipping routes. We need to realise that the long-term problems associated with piracy need to be dealt with on land and not at sea, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot) has said. The present conditions in Somalia promote piracy, lawlessness, instability, unchecked crime and poverty. The international community needs to do a better job of co-ordinating the military response to piracy in the gulf of Aden. Rules of engagement and better command and control need to be established as well as the operational situation will allow.
	Currently off the horn of Africa are two combined maritime forces headquartered in Bahrain, CTF 150 and CTF 151, the European-led Operation Atalanta, assets from the standing NATO maritime group 1, and individual ships from India, Russia, Malaysia, China and Iran. All are conducting anti-piracy operations, security escorts and counter-terrorism operations in the region, and each operates under a different set of rules of engagement. To make matters more complicated, there are no formal command relationship agreements to co-ordinate their missions.
	Having multiple maritime security operations all aiming to accomplish the same missions and all operating in the same area without formal co-operation is duplicative and dangerous, and could lead to failure. Also, attention to counter-terrorism operations in the region cannot be jeopardised by the current concern about piracy. Bad as the situation seems to us now, it could easily become much worse. Most piracy off the horn of Africa is criminally motivated: it is a quick way to make money. However, there is the larger threat of an organised global terrorist network, such as al-Qaeda, becoming directly involved with the piracy. As things stand, most piracy is driven by criminal factions that benefit from the lawless nature of a failed state. Just imagine what the outcome would be of a piracy campaign sponsored, planned, and executed by al-Qaeda.
	On 19 May the European Union decided to extend the area of operations of its anti-piracy mission by almost a third. Can Ministers tell us whether there are plans to provide more resources for the mission, or whether the EU will simply ask its member states to do more with less?
	Piracy is just one piece of a very complicated maritime security jigsaw, which includes counter-terrorism, keeping shipping lanes and oil platforms secured in the Gulf, and deterring the Iranian navy. Piracy will never be completely eradicated from the seas, as history tends to suggest, but we must do all we can to minimise the threat.
	Other, newer threats to our security are emerging, in cyberspace and space in particular. The recent speech by Secretary Gates was particularly interesting in its reorientation of American policy on those threats. We need to debate these issues in the House in detail, and I hope that a specific time will be found for us to do so, but today the list that I have given—mirroring what was said by the Secretary of State—will suffice. International terrorism, fundamentalist extremism, rogue states, piracy and nuclear proliferation are enough for us to be getting on with.
	We must constantly pay tribute to the bravery of our armed forces and their families, our intelligence services, and the numerous civilian organisations that support them and us with the security that we too often take for granted. Let me issue a plea to the Government: perhaps next time our debate on their contribution will not be timetabled for the parliamentary relegation zone, but will be given the time appropriate to their importance and their sacrifice.

Madeleine Moon: I listened with great interest to the speech of the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox), but I cannot agree with his statement about the inappropriateness of today for the debate. I think it highly appropriate that we are here in the House on the day of the European elections, discussing defence in the world, because it is thanks to the European Union—its emphasis on consensus, co-operation, discussion, debate and working together while simultaneously cherishing the unique and independent nature of member states—that we, citizens of Europe, have experienced the longest period of peace in our history.

Liam Fox: The hon. Lady speaks of the appropriateness of the timing of the debate. Just for the  Hansard record, would she care to tell us how many Labour Back Benchers are currently present?

Madeleine Moon: The hon. Gentleman clearly has poor eyesight if he needs my help in ascertaining that.

Liam Fox: One!

Madeleine Moon: The hon. Gentleman shouts "one" from a sedentary position—but, on the other hand, it is me.

Gerald Howarth: It is I!

Madeleine Moon: I do apologise; I am a product of a comprehensive education.
	It is said that freedom is never free, but that it comes at a price—a price exemplified by what we are willing to pay to defend our freedom. Why am I here today, rather than knocking on doors and getting out the vote? I am here because I recognise that a debate on defence in the world is one of the most critical debates that we as a country must engage in. Defence is where we stand tall and are clear about our priorities, our values, and those things that we will defend to the last—those things that we will ask our young to fight to defend.
	On Saturday, I will be in Porthcawl to commemorate D-day—a day when so many died, and whose sacrifice we continue to remember and honour. In Porthcawl, a sleepy seaside town in Wales, D-day affected every family; throughout the town, people knew members of the armed forces who were stationed there practising both landings on to our beaches and getting from them into our sand dunes. Families also remembered going down to the railway station a few years earlier to collect sick, wounded and exhausted soldiers returning from Dunkirk and taking them home to feed and care for. In the years since D-day, much has changed in terms of defence, but much has remained the same, too. However, such immediate and direct connection between us as citizens and our armed forces and our personal understanding of the need for security and defence have, I fear, been weakened. A deepening disengagement has arisen between the public and our armed forces, but I know that, as Members, we take seriously the responsibility to help re-establish that engagement.
	Nowadays, the enemy we need to defend ourselves against is less clear. The nation-to-nation battlefront has been replaced by the insidious fear of an enemy that is unpredictable, unseen and global. We face pandemics such as swine fever and bird flu, which is carried by fellow citizens who are free to travel the world, but also, potentially, carried deliberately by terrorists. We have tsunamis, heat waves and hurricanes as our climate change brings with it threats of food, water and energy shortages. Pirate DVDs are sold, sometimes to law-abiding citizens, and people traffickers and drug dealers sell their goods, all of which can fund terrorism and crime. New technology brings new threats—cyber attacks, asymmetrical warfare—and the internet has grown into a powerful voice, where small mistakes can have huge consequences.
	Our defence against those threats is a broad security toolkit, which includes not only our armed forces, but our politicians, diplomats and security services, and our law enforcement, ambulance and coastguard agencies and other emergency services, as well as our economists, non-governmental organisations and citizens. Together, they exemplify the fact that security is the prime function of the state, for without the state there is no rule of law, no peace, no stability and no security.
	Defence is no longer the remit only of the Ministry of Defence; every Department of State has a defence role to play. That includes supporting education around the world, establishing individual freedoms, protecting human rights wherever they are attacked, creating fair-trade agreements to allow countries to develop, and the promotion of democracy and the rule of law both nationally and internationally.
	Defence in a global world requires working with regional partners in institutions such as the European Union and NATO, and with countries with whom we have memorandums of understanding, treaties, defence obligations and where agreements have been signed, and also with global bodies such as the G20, the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, to build consensus and co-operation.

William Cash: Does the hon. Lady agree that in relation to defence and the European Union there is a great deal to be said for our ensuring that our bottom line is defending ourselves, because our first duty is to our constituents and the country at large?

Madeleine Moon: I fail to see what the hon. Gentleman is trying to achieve by that question.  [ Interruption. ] May I complete the point? Obviously we have an individual responsibility to our constituents and our nation state has a responsibility to its citizens, but as I said at the beginning, it is thanks to our European consensus and our European involvement that we have maintained peace across Europe for longer than at any time in our history.

William Cash: Absolute rubbish.

Madeleine Moon: I apologise if the hon. Gentleman thinks I am talking rubbish—I obviously spoke the same rubbish when I taught history.
	The United Nations agreed the universal declaration of human rights as far back as 1948, and many individuals from across the political spectrum have argued that we have a moral duty to ensure that human rights are protected no matter where the abuses occur. Anyone who watched Kate Adie's programme on Tiananmen Square last night and saw the ongoing effect of those events on those who were present will understand how far we still have to travel for all members of the Security Council to understand the central tenet of human rights. A discussion on the future role of the United Nations is long overdue. Should the Security Council be expanded to give wider credibility to its voice and decisions? Would the inclusion of India and Brazil, as emerging economically powerful nations, widen the legitimacy of UN decisions and heighten the interdependency of our world?
	Despite this criticism, it was only the UN, in 2000, that could unanimously pass resolution 1325, which addressed the impact of war on women and called for their involvement in peace and resolution discussions and at all levels of decision making in conflict-resolution talks. Why women? The answer is that the most vulnerable person in the front line of any conflict is not in the military—it is the female civilian. It remains the men with the guns who get to the peace table; women are for the non-governmental organisations and the male leaders to sort out. I earnestly believe that resolution 1325 must become a central tenet of our capacity building, if for no other reason than that we know that the wider engagement of women in their communities and in their countries through education and employment can increase a country's gross domestic product by 3 per cent.
	I am a new member of the Select Committee on Defence. Unlike its other members, I have no background in defence, although my father served in the Merchant Navy and for many years was active in the Sea Cadet Corps. As a child of the '60s, I marched against war and joined CND. Before I entered the House, my background was in health and social care, child and adult protection, women's rights and the environment, so what am I doing on the Defence Committee and, indeed, in this debate?  [ Laughter. ] There is laughter from the gentlemen on the Conservative Benches, who clearly do not feel that women have a right to a voice in defence matters, and that perhaps shows the problem that women face in entering the world of defence; it remains the macho world of the virile male who has failed to protect women for generations.

Ann Winterton: rose—

Madeleine Moon: I shall certainly give way to the courteous hon. Lady, as opposed to the giggling people on the Conservative Front Bench.

Ann Winterton: As someone who has been interested in defence for some time and has built up a slight expertise in one particular area, may I say that my male colleagues have been very helpful and supportive? It is a very good thing that the hon. Lady is on the Defence Committee and I hope that she enjoys her work. She will learn a lot about the defence world and will be able to contribute greatly.

Madeleine Moon: I thank the hon. Lady for those remarks. I can confirm to her that my colleagues on the Defence Committee have been highly supportive, most helpful and extremely courteous. My comments were not aimed at the members of the Defence Committee.

James Arbuthnot: May I put on the record that I confirm precisely what my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Ann Winterton) said?

Madeleine Moon: I can confirm that the right hon. Gentleman, the Chairman of the Defence Committee, has been one of the most courteous.
	I am a member of the Committee because I recognise that defending our way of life, with all its failings and faults, is imperative. The people who died on D-day and in the days before and after that enabled us to enjoy the freedoms that we sadly take for granted—to have the quality of life and to have the expansion of health, education and opportunities across the sexes and classes that we enjoy in Britain today. As citizens of this country we have a balance of rights, interests and responsibilities. So too, as a citizen of the world, our nation has rights to defend and responsibilities to discharge. Sometimes, as in the past, the maintenance of those rights and the discharge of those responsibilities in the wider world require the applications of force.
	At present, we are actively involved in conflict in Afghanistan, in a crucial battle against the Taliban that must be won in order to ensure any modicum of security in an unsettled region and across the world. It is in our national interest to be in Afghanistan. We do not want that country once again to be a base for international terrorism that threatens us all.
	Since joining the Defence Committee, I have also joined the armed forces parliamentary scheme so that I can flesh out my hinterland of understanding of the recruitment, selection, training, skills, equipment and pressures on our military. I am spending a year with the RAF and have been deeply impressed by the dedication, focus and skills of everyone I have met.

Bob Russell: An increasing number of young ladies are now playing roles in the armed forces. What is the hon. Lady's view of females being put in the front line of infantry regiments, in the killing field?

Madeleine Moon: We have women in the front line in all sorts of roles, and women have shown their capacity to meet the requirements of the front line in those roles. I see no problem in women undertaking front-line roles.
	Later this year, as part of the scheme, I will visit Afghanistan and I look forward to seeing not only the security activities of our forces, but the work they are undertaking in capacity building, protecting civilians, stabilisation and reconstruction, the use of aid, training and political engagement. That is work our forces have undertaken over the years across the globe, and of which we can be rightly proud.
	If we are to be successful in the region, we must also undertake those responsibilities in Pakistan. We know that Pakistan, as a nuclear state, faces instability. We know that the Taliban have secured bases in Pakistan. The risk to the world of an unstable Pakistan or a Pakistan where the Taliban have access to nuclear weapons is too frightening to contemplate.
	Our armed forces have played a crucial role in keeping peace in the Balkans. Across Africa, we are looking at protecting civilians and at stabilisation and reconstruction. In the Falklands, we still maintain a critical military presence, providing security to the people who live on those islands.
	It is inevitable that as some of the old threats to our national security begin to fade others will replace them, but our common values of democracy, individual liberty, the rule of law and the peaceful resolution of disputes require us to be vigilant and prepared. Sometimes our armed forces will have to be deployed to defend those values. When those occasions arise, we must ensure that we are fully prepared, that our armed forces are resourced and that they are fully supported both before and after deployment. They rightly deserve quality housing for their families and quality training and equipment. As we increasingly understand the effects of trauma from the tasks that our forces are asked to carry out, the experiences that they encounter and the grief that they face, we must also provide quality psychological support both before and after deployment.
	I understand that in this complex world, the MOD has two key tasks: defending the United Kingdom and its interests while strengthening international peace and stability. As we approach the anniversary of D-day, it would perhaps be appropriate to remind ourselves of a quote from Winston Churchill:
	"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."

Nick Harvey: I always welcome the opportunity to debate defence in the world, but I echo the observations of the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox). There is one date in the annual parliamentary calendar that is the most notorious graveyard slot, and that is usually the first Thursday in May, when we have a round of local elections. This year, it happens to be in June and is even more of a graveyard slot, because the local elections coincide with the European elections. I was absolutely astonished to see this piece of timetabling when the agenda came out for this week. Nevertheless, we plough on and this is a welcome opportunity to discuss these matters.
	Like others, I start by paying tribute to those who have lost their lives in the service of our country. On this occasion, as we are having this debate at a time when operations in Iraq are largely concluded and withdrawal is about to commence, I particularly want to say that although my colleagues and I did not agree with the decision to invade Iraq, we very much pay tribute to the courage, professionalism and dedication of all those who have served throughout the engagement in Iraq, including those who have given their lives and those who have come back from those operations wounded in body and in mind. They have done what the nation called on them to do and we should pay tribute to the service that they have given.

Bernard Jenkin: I want to refer to the hon. Gentleman's earlier point about the timing of the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) suggested that the debate was taking place now because the Government regard it as unimportant. Perhaps it is because they regard this debate as so important and yet embarrassing, because of the failures of Government policy, that they have decided to put it on this day.

Nick Harvey: The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. I suspect we will never know quite why it was, but the discussion that the hon. Member for Woodspring imagined taking place in the Leader of the House's office sounded altogether authentic to my way of thinking.
	Although the debate does, in a sense, mark the end of most of our activity in Iraq, I am sure, and hope very much, that we will regularly debate not only the state of security in that country and the wider region but the progress of economic development—a subject that has been mentioned—so that we can judge over the longer term what the overall impact of the west's involvement there has been. However, our attention now rightly focuses largely on Afghanistan, where our troops are working tirelessly, but where it is widely recognised that we have a long, hard job still to do. There is no prospect, in any way, of a quick fix. The death toll has risen quickly in recent weeks, and the insurgents are constantly employing new and ever more deadly methods, to which we have to find new ways of responding.
	The Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), who speaks in the House on defence procurement matters, said in response to a question on Monday in this Chamber that more and more equipment was being delivered to the front line, and we have to hope that that is right. In some cases, he did not give many indications of numbers and quantities; I suppose that he might reasonably say that he would not want to broadcast some of that information. However, we still have serious ongoing concerns, both about the provision of armoured vehicles—I readily acknowledge the significant progress that has been made on that—and about helicopter lift capacity, which will become a real problem the longer the engagement goes on in Afghanistan.
	I think that it was the hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) who tabled a question some months ago about the likely availability of helicopters in years to come, as existing helicopters go out of commission. Making even the most optimistic assumptions about the in-service date for new helicopters that will follow, one can see that there are serious problems coming up in the next few years. I still do not feel that we have heard any adequate response from the Government on how we will get our helicopter lift capacity up to that which the troops need in Afghanistan. I welcome initiatives such as the one that the Government undertook with the French Government to try to boost the availability of helicopters at a European level, but thus far, I do not think that it has yielded much. I hope that they will stick at it, though, and I hope that more NATO countries will provide helicopters for the operation. However, the last time I saw an answer on the subject, only three had been committed; they were from the Czech Republic.
	The lack of helicopter capacity is becoming a big issue. People have been going on about it for a long time, but I just do not feel that a response commensurate to the challenge has been forthcoming. I know that we await decisions on some routine procurements, whether they be from AgustaWestland or whoever, but I wonder whether the sheer scale of the problem will require interim solutions to be found, even if ultimately longer-term solutions will point in a different direction. There is an availability of helicopters, although they are possibly not of the sort of capability that we would ideally want in the helicopters that we will build and develop in the long term. However, there are short-term solutions, if the Government are willing to consider them.
	It has already been said in this debate that any consideration of Afghanistan increasingly needs to take into account the situation in Pakistan. Obviously, the Americans have done that by appointing a single envoy to deal with both problems. There are very worrying developments that should cause us all concern. The unstable state of Pakistan is greatly worrying. Although its Government's forces have hit back seemingly quite effectively recently, the underlying problems are there for all to see. Also, increasingly reports are coming through of Taliban elements in Afghanistan and Pakistan coming together—up to now they have had certain tensions, and there have been difficulties between them—because they recognise that they have a new challenge to face, particularly as America is committing more troops to Afghanistan. It is hard to predict or sense exactly how that will play out on the ground, but it raises the point that, as far as quite authoritative reports would have us believe, the Pakistan intelligence agency had, for good or ill, been providing resources to the Afghanistan elements of the Taliban in anticipation of having to deal with them at some point after the west had completed its operations in Afghanistan. Those elements are now cosying up to the Pakistan Taliban, so we end up with the possibility—by no means unprecedented—that the Pakistani military will find itself confronting an enemy to whom it has contributed arms and equipment. That, I hope, will at the very least give it pause for thought in terms of the future, because there is a self-perpetuating cycle in the region, whereby funds that are given for one purpose end up having a completely different and unanticipated impact.
	The spill-over between the two countries is potentially difficult, because to date NATO's Afghanistan operation has relied very much on safe and easy routes through Pakistan and on the resolute support of Pakistan. The question of whether in the future we will be able to count on that to anything like the same degree worries me considerably.
	I, like the official Opposition's Front-Bench team, have said in previous defence debates that there is a long overdue need for a strategic defence review. It remains a mystery to me why the Government, uniquely, do not seem to think it necessary. We know that the Ministry of Defence is under intense budgetary pressure: there is, by anyone's reckoning, a black hole in its budget; we regularly discuss in the House the impact of overstretch and ongoing operations; and we know that the difficulties, needs and demands on the defence budget will increase inexorably year on year. However, we know also that, in the wake of the economic crisis, the next Government will have a major task on their hands to try to control public expenditure in such a fashion that restores some equilibrium to the nation's finances. They will have to take some immensely difficult decisions, balancing the different demands on the public purse which will come from the different Departments. In that context, in particular, a strategic defence review is absolutely fundamental and necessary.
	We have to ask the basic question, what does the nation expect its armed forces to do in the years to come and how can we achieve that? The question has also to be asked, are we all still of the view, as I am, that we should continue the task set out in the previous strategic defence review of acting as a force for good throughout the world? Some have called it liberal interventionism, and if the answer is yes, that we are, what are its implications for manpower, equipment and expenditure? If those of us who believe that we should remain willing to play such a part want to take the public with us and convince them that, in the climate that I have described, painful and difficult choices have to be made between competing demands on the public purse, the only way in which we can hope to do so is by having a major national debate about the armed forces' role and the resources that should be made available to them. The only sensible way to go about that is through a Government-conducted defence review, and I very much hope that, whatever Government are in power after the election, which cannot be far away, they will see that, if we want to continue to play such a part, we need to take the public with us.

Liam Fox: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is also a need for better predictability and empiricism in the process? Does he agree also that we need to begin a defence review by asking what Britain's national interests are; what the predictable threat environment is; what capabilities we require to protect those interests in that environment; what equipment programmes we require; and, then, to assess our budgetary capabilities? We need to bring logic and empiricism to what is currently a chaotic process.

Nick Harvey: I entirely agree with all that. If at the end of the process, which we should approach in exactly that way, we still find a gap between what we sincerely want to do and what we believe we are capable of amassing the resources to do, we will have to consider how we can best co-operate with our allies, particularly in NATO, to ensure that the resources that we can make available dovetail as effectively as possible. In that way, even if we are not capable of doing on the very widest front all the things that we want to do alone, we will at least be capable of ensuring that they can be done in co-operation with our allies. Better collective planning with our allies would enable that, but an absolute prerequisite is a systematic, evidence-based and empirical approach to a review, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned.
	I cannot understand why the Government continue to resist. This side of an election, I would have thought that at the very least there would be some benefit in both sides of the House agreeing the sort of questions that need to be asked and the sort of approach that might be taken, even if in reality the work of the review would not begin in earnest until the other side of the election.
	Huge procurement projects are sitting—notionally, at least—on the Government's books. We are waiting for answers, but the Government cannot make decisions about the projects because of the economic circumstances. It is not always possible to identify precisely what the dilemmas are, for reasons to which the hon. Gentleman has alluded in the House before. I am thinking of this country's deficit in terms of the transparency of our procurement processes compared with those in many other western democracies, where national legislatures can scrutinise in far more detail the procurement decisions and dilemmas faced by the Governments in question. We do ourselves no good service in this country through the opaque way in which we go about many of these things.
	I have repeatedly urged that we need a new approach to procurement, because, more than anything else in the defence field, it has not been a success in recent decades. One can point to the egregious examples of procurement mishaps, but our procurement processes are not adequate right across the piece. We have to start them again from scratch. In respect of procurement and of maintaining strategic defence industries, we need to look more effectively at how we co-operate best with our natural allies.
	There have been some terrible co-operative procurements, but that does not mean that we should be put off the idea altogether. I abhor the approach that has looked at European defence procurements and then got into the realms of pork barrel politics by divvying up the work through the absurd notion of juste retour. The defence industries are well ahead of the political community in having already organised themselves along international lines; very few of the companies are national—they are all transnational, multinational and international. National Governments have some way to go in catching up with and taking advantage of that.
	The hon. Gentleman rightly alluded to the renewed threats presented by the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran. If either country goes ahead with its nuclear programmes, in the wake of international condemnation and in breach of the existing treaties, that will inevitably trigger proliferation among their neighbouring states. I welcome the efforts by French President Sarkozy to try to re-engage Iran in a new dialogue about its nuclear ambitions. I regret that the progress that seemed to be being made with North Korea appears to have gone into reverse gear. Next year, we have the nuclear non-proliferation treaty review conference. I hope that the new dialogue that appears to exist between President Obama and Russia is capable of giving some renewed impetus to the course of nuclear disarmament. However, the good news that one might detect in their rapprochement has to be balanced against the more worrying news in North Korea and Iran.
	Some very tough decisions need to be taken in the defence arena, and I do not believe there is any realistic chance of that happening this side of an election. Those decisions should not be kept waiting for too much longer. For that reason, I share the wish of others to see an election as soon as possible so that a new Government have the authority to take some of these difficult decisions because, whatever the final conclusions, they will have an opportunity cost. I hope that the dedication of our armed forces, who are fighting in many different parts of the world on our behalf, will be matched by a determination in the Ministry of Defence to resolve some of the issues that have been awaiting decisions for far too long.
	We are very well served by our armed forces personnel, and there is some way to go yet before we really do justice to the work that they are putting in on our behalf around the world by ensuring that we sort out our priorities and equip them with everything that they need to guarantee their safety and the success of the operations in which they are engaged.

James Arbuthnot: I want to begin, if I may, by saying that this debate is an absolute disgrace. It is quite wrong that an issue of such crucial importance is always debated before an empty House. We have to find a way of bringing out the debate in such a way as to capture the imagination of the people of this country and, frankly, of this Parliament. At the moment, we are talking to an empty Public Gallery, an empty Press Gallery and an empty Chamber. None of the important things that we will say about this vital subject, which is central to the survival of this country, to our values, and to democracies across the world will be listened to at all. We might as well not be here.
	Having said that, I still have one or two things that I might as well say. When we had a similar debate this time last year, we would have been reminding ourselves that Basra had been completely transformed as a result of the "Charge of the Knights". We would have looked at Iraq and thought, much to our surprise in many ways, that things had gone much better than we might have expected. We should all share in the tribute paid to our armed forces for the immense things that they achieved in Iraq and for the massive sacrifices that they made. We express our thanks to them for that.
	I was always more optimistic about what we could achieve in Iraq than about what we could achieve in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, we have had the benefit of operating in a larger coalition. Coalitions bring strength, but they also bring weaknesses and difficulties. The weakness is a lack of coherence and a risk of international suspicions and resentments. There is a real risk that some of the problems of Afghanistan will always be thought to be somebody else's problem. We are operating in a coalition there, and we cannot achieve everything that we want to because we do not have the final say. Partly because of that, we are failing as an international coalition to recognise the enormous size of the task that we are facing.
	In the Balkans, we put 20 times as many troops and 50 times as much resource into a problem that was rather easier to solve. In Afghanistan, the key task that we face is bringing governance to a country that, frankly, has not had it in the past. We have as our secondary task the destruction of the crop that is the main livelihood of much of the country, which is a rather challenging task in itself. The tools that we have to achieve those two tasks are the Afghans themselves, who are wonderful people but do not really like being told what to do by foreigners.
	The Select Committee on Defence is about to begin an inquiry into the comprehensive approach. It is a great honour to chair that Committee, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon) for her contribution, recent as it has been. I can assure her that is hugely valued. We are lucky to have a dedicated group of members and a wonderful support staff who ensure that our inquiries are as productive as they can be.
	The questions about the comprehensive approach are difficult to answer. Are we tying the development of new livelihoods in with the security that our forces bring? For example, will the road network be kept secure from improvised explosive devices so that people can get their produce to market? Will it be kept secure from roadblocks, sometimes police roadblocks, where protection money is demanded despite a tiny margin of profit? That is the sort of thing that local people in Afghanistan worry about. All those issues have to be dealt with in a country that has little education, mountainous terrain, no secure infrastructure, no policeable borders and no natural resources. It is awash with weapons, most of them provided by us. The task is a large one to face.

Liam Fox: I hope that one of the most important issues that the Defence Committee will examine is Britain's ability to carry out construction in a conflict environment. It seems to me that until we are able to develop that capability, there will be a major gap in our ability to deal with conflicts such as Afghanistan should they arise in any other part of the world.

James Arbuthnot: I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, who has put his finger on a most important point. That is one of the matters on which we will concentrate heavily in our inquiry into the comprehensive approach, and I am grateful to him for making that point. I believe that it was my hon. Friend who said that local government in Helmand is making good progress under Governor Mangal, who I agree is an extremely effective governor, but it is good progress from an extremely low base.
	Obviously we cannot talk about Afghanistan without considering Pakistan, just next door. Pakistan, of course, is a nuclear power and has already contributed dramatically to the proliferation of nuclear power through the operations of A. Q. Khan. The dangers of some of its nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the Taliban or al-Qaeda are huge. The close links and instant communication between this country and Pakistan mean that threats there are immediately threats here.
	Pakistan's economy is in trouble in the global recession, so it is unlikely to be able to contain the insurgency there without our help. Yet there is no prospect of foreign troops being allowed into Pakistan to help it do so. As I said in an intervention on the Secretary of State, all that is not made easier by the fact that Pakistan spends only 2 per cent. of its gross domestic product on education, which leaves such a huge void for the madrassahs to fill and provides an opportunity for people to be influenced by insurgents and radicals from an early age.
	The instability in the region means that it has taken over from Israel as the most insecure area of the world. It must therefore be the first priority of not only this country but of our allies. We must begin the huge task of explaining the importance of all that to our allies, because we are not strong enough to cope with helping Pakistan alone. Even with the help of the United States, we are not strong enough. We need the support of our European allies above all, so we must do a lot of diplomatic work.
	Next door is Iran. When the President of Iran talked about wiping Israel off the face of the map, he was not joking; he firmly believes it. The support for terrorism in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and elsewhere has become a hallmark of Iran's foreign policy. Iran is a threat to all its neighbours, which they recognise perhaps better than many European countries, which have provided such divided and weak responses to Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Madeleine Moon: The right hon. Gentleman talked about the importance of engaging with not only our American but our European allies on Pakistan, and the difficulties that we all face because of attitudes emanating from Iran. Does he agree that, in using our diplomacy, it is crucial to talk to other Muslim leaders so that what is right for Pakistan does not become a western Christian view but a world view of the changes that are needed?

James Arbuthnot: I entirely agree. I pay tribute to President Obama for his speech today in Egypt, in which he said—very effectively—that America is not at war with Islam and never will be. Islam is not the problem; it is a great religion, which we all respect enormously.
	Next door to Iran is Russia—a wonderful country which is led by a small Government of little democratic validity. It is capable of putting a stranglehold on energy for the rest of the world, and it appears to be establishing mechanisms to achieve that. It is willing to bully its former Soviet neighbours with lethal and disproportionate force, and its motivation appears to be gaining self-respect. That is not the best way to go about achieving that. If Russia could bring itself firmly within the community of nations, and work for the good of the world—as the hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) said that we as a country should do—its self-respect would return in much shorter order.

Liam Fox: My right hon. Friend is a respected and long-serving Member, who has also served in government. From his experience, why does he think that western Governments are making so little comment about the continuing Russian presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Are we simply afraid of upsetting Russia, or is the subject of little importance or interest to western nations?

James Arbuthnot: I think that there are a lot of reasons for that. I suspect that one of the reasons is that western Governments are not spending enough on defence, so they do not know what else they could do. They do not know whether they could back up any words about Russia with actions. That is a serious worry about our western allies as a whole, but it is also a serious worry about this country, although I will come to that in just a moment.
	Next door to Russia is China, which has its pressures of population and an urban-rural divide. Incidentally, if we are looking ahead to problems of defence in the world, a real cause of instability in the future may be the vast empty lands of eastern Russia right next door to the heavily over-populated areas of China, particularly given that those areas of eastern Russia have such huge natural resources. I suspect that Russia is looking ahead with apprehension to what might happen there. We should begin to form a view on what effect that sort of issue might have on the western world.
	China is growing strongly. It owns a huge amount of United States debt. The Chinese are investing in education in a way that will be very effective for their country. They take a long-term view—perhaps a longer-term view than the western world takes—and we cannot ignore their phenomenal rise, because it will have defence implications. All those things are things that we can look at in deciding what we ought to be thinking about in respect of defence in the world.

Madeleine Moon: I am sorry to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman a second time, but he is talking about an area that is of interest to me, particularly in respect of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation and its implications for the northern border to which he has referred, and China's attitude towards the other powers in the region. China's stance under the terms of the agreement, which is about non-interference, is that neither it nor any other member of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation—Russia is a signatory, while Pakistan and India have observer status—will try to impose values on other states, which is something that they see the west as doing. However, those states will agree to combine to protect each other's independence and integrity. Is that new force not something that we should be aware of, and is it not a risk to our ways of working?

James Arbuthnot: That is the current Chinese attitude. I suspect that as China's requirements for more and more resources grow, in order to satisfy a growing middle class in China, the Chinese will begin to need to make more inroads into other countries, not just in that region, but in places such as Africa. The issue that the hon. Lady raises is certainly something of which we need to be strongly aware. I know that she has expressed an interest in it on the Defence Committee, and I hope that she will continue to do so, because it is a matter of great importance.
	So far I have been talking about things that we are able to see already. Ten years ago we would not have been able to foresee any of them—except, perhaps, those to do with China. What will be happening in 10 years' time that we cannot now foresee? Are we prepared now to have a defence budget and a defence stance that will be completely unable to cope with the unforeseen in 10 years' time?
	I believe that defence is at a watershed. There are fundamental structural flaws in the Ministry of Defence, at a time when the Army is down to fewer than 100,000 and people are no longer sure what equipment can be bought. There are huge internal battles for survival, for supremacy and for equipment between the different services, and with the civil service. There appears to be no cohesive view to show to the world, or even internally, within the Ministry of Defence. There is a budget that has been weakened over decades by war and by underfunding.
	At the end of the cold war, we saw two changes. First, nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction stopped being as effective as they had previously been, so we should then have spent more, not less, on conventional arms. Secondly, the world became less stable, rather than more stable. Again, we should therefore have spent more, rather than less.  [ Interruption. ] I will give way to the Minister if he wants to intervene. No, he does not. So, we took the peace dividend, and that was a serious mistake. If the Minister is hinting, by his gestures from a sedentary position, that it was the Conservatives who took that peace dividend, I can assure him that we were whipped on by the Labour party every step of the way. Everybody in the western world was saying, "Thank heavens, we can spend less on equipment," and it was the Labour party that went into the 1997 election promising to reduce spending on defence to the European average.
	It was a dreadful mistake to take the peace dividend. The result is that there is now a black hole in the defence budget. Things have been made worse recently by the knowledge that there is to be no bad news coming out of defence, and no new money going into defence. A lot of the defence decisions that should have been taken last year or the year before have therefore been postponed until just after the general election. When the pigeons come home to roost, they will discover that there is no roost to come home to.
	There is a strategy in the Ministry of Defence that relies very heavily on the power of new equipment but ignores the quality that comes from quantity. The manpower of the armed forces has therefore been reduced to a level that is close to unsustainable. The hon. Member for North Devon talked about helicopters. The helicopters are going to become much more powerful, but there will be so few of them that they will not be able to be anywhere.

Bob Russell: The right hon. Gentleman said that the size of the Army was about 100,000. Is it his understanding that approximately 10 per cent. are from overseas? Does he agree that there is a need to recruit more from the United Kingdom if we are not to become increasingly dependent on overseas members of the Army?

James Arbuthnot: I think that the figure is 9 per cent., but, yes, I believe that it is necessary to have larger armed forces. I am just about to talk about money, but where is the money to come from for that? This is a serious issue that the country—not just the Government, the Opposition and politicians—has to face.
	We are relying heavily on more and more powerful equipment, but we are still losing the capacity to act alongside our closest ally, the United States. We have dwindling armed forces and a tiny reserve, and all of this means that there is less and less connection with the people whom the armed forces are protecting, because they do not meet them on a regular basis. I am afraid that the review of the reserve forces appears to be managing the decline of the armed forces rather than inspiring their rebirth. We have a public who do not understand the armed forces or what they are doing, and who therefore do not support defence spending. As a result, there is no money to spend on defence. We have spent the money, for decades ahead, on the banks.

Gerald Howarth: My right hon. Friend suggests that the public may not be as supportive of the armed forces as they once were, but I would like him to reflect further on that. The common wisdom has been that the public will not support increased expenditure because they do not understand the armed forces, but I put it to my right hon. Friend that we have seen a quite astonishing wave of outpourings from people recently—and not just in Wootton Bassett, where the reception of our fallen heroes was particularly dignified, but right across the land. Perhaps we politicians—and, indeed, military commanders—are in danger of misunderstanding the public mood.

James Arbuthnot: I desperately hope that my hon. Friend is right. I feel that if the public are asked whether they think the armed forces are being treated unfairly, they will reply with a resounding yes, but if they are asked whether they want funding for the new ward in their local hospital to be cut in order to provide more for the armed forces, I suspect that they will be much less certain in their answer. I believe that we have to take the argument over this question out to the public, because they need to understand the issues the country is facing.
	When it comes to the current team of Defence Ministers—it is an excellent team, incidentally—I have a suspicion, although none of them have told me so, that they are desperately hoping that they lose the next election because some of the decisions that they would otherwise have to take would, largely because of the lack of money, be so awful. They know that we are in deep trouble.

Bernard Jenkin: Staying with the theme of the public's attitude towards defence spending, we in the House of Commons should have learned in recent weeks how neglecting an issue can engulf us in public rage. Neglect of this particular issue may be fine in peacetime and when we are deploying our troops in faraway and little-understood battles, but if we require our armed forces to do something at short notice that they are not capable of doing and it results in disaster, we need to be aware that the wrath of the British people over our neglect will be unimaginable—and we will deserve it.

James Arbuthnot: My hon. Friend is quite right, which is why conducting this debate on this particular day is such a disgrace. It is excellent when Defence Ministers regularly go out to places such as Afghanistan and know what they are talking about—but I cannot remember the last time a Treasury Minister went out to Afghanistan. Perhaps the Minister could enlighten me about that, but I suspect that he probably will not.

Bob Ainsworth: The right hon. Gentleman makes some important points, which we should all be prepared to address. Let me first reassure him, however, that no matter what the difficulties in future, I would far rather take the decisions myself than have him or his colleagues taking them; he should be under no illusions whatever about that. What he appears to be saying—I think with a degree of honesty—is that despite the fact that he deprecates the situation we are in, his own party, too, would have to cut defence capability.  [Interruption.] That is effectively what he said. If he is not saying that, will he tell us, in the honest and open way in which he speaks in these debates, what he believes will be in all the parties' manifestos at the coming general election—no matter how near or far away it is—and, in particular, whether his party is likely to pledge to improve defence spending over and above what the Government have pledged?

James Arbuthnot: I did not say that my party would cut defence. Frankly, however, I very much doubt that there will be much difference between the defence spending plans in the Labour manifesto and those in the Conservative manifesto. What I have always tried to do as Chairman of the Defence Select Committee is to tell the people of this country that they need to realise how important defence spending is, and that they should put pressure on both the Chancellor and shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and on all of us, to change our approach to defence spending, because the whole country needs it.
	It is essential that we change, because our defence spending is down to about 2 per cent. of GDP—the lowest since the 1930s. That is leading to disrespect. The people of this country have not discussed that or considered the problem that is about to hit them, which will hit them whoever wins the next election. The issue is not whether we remain a first-order power, but whether we become a second-order or a third-order power. In other words, will we be able to operate alongside France, or will we be limited to operating alongside Belgium and Italy?
	The public, I hope, will have a view on that, but only if they are asked. For that reason, I strongly believe that we need a strategic defence review. One thing that we need to consider is research and technology. I shall quote a paragraph:
	"A recent MOD sponsored study analysing 11 major defence capable nations has uncovered a highly significant correlation between equipment capability and R&T investment in the last 5-30 years... It shows that there is a simple 'you get what you pay for' relationship between R&T spend and equipment quality, with a sharp law of diminishing returns, and that R&T investment buys a time advantage over open market equipment."
	That paragraph was written by the Government in the defence industrial strategy, so what is the Ministry of Defence doing about this? Astonishingly, it is cutting its research and technology budget by 7 per cent. this year, and it looks as though that is to continue over the next few years.
	The Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), who has responsibility for defence equipment and support, tells us that that is a simple matter of priorities. He is right; it is—and he has the wrong priorities. Our ability to respond quickly and effectively to emerging threats is built on the knowledge base, which is itself built on sustained investment in research and development since the 1980s. He might say that he wants industry to do more of the research. It is doing that. In 2006-07, according to the Society of British Aerospace Companies, the defence sector invested £3.34 billion in research and development, which was about 40 per cent. of the EU's and 15 per cent. of the UK's research and development spend. However, this country's defence industry needs some customers, which means the Ministry of Defence.
	After that catalogue of despair there is some hope, which comes from two sources. The first source of that hope is the men and women of our armed forces. Long, long ago as a Defence Minister, I was awed by the strength of purpose of our armed forces—their determination, honesty, courage, humility and intellectual ability, which I was not necessarily expecting when I went into the Ministry, but it was certainly there. They were wonderful men and women, and so were the civil servants who supported them. As Chairman of the Defence Committee, I have had that confirmed every time I have met them. We have some outstanding people; I just do not think that we are making the best use of them.
	The second source of hope is the resilience and determination of the people of this country. When they are given the right information and things are properly explained, they make the right choices.
	I shall end on the point that we need a strategic defence review in the full public gaze. We are getting a non-strategic defence review in the secrecy of the Ministry of Defence. That will not do the trick. First, as my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) so rightly said, we need to work out what defence is for. What do we need to defend? Secondly, we need to reform the Ministry of Defence so that it becomes coherent, cohesive, functional, straightforward and directed.
	My hon. Friend correctly said that we need to reform the defence acquisition process, and I was delighted with the Secretary of State's comments about Bernard Gray's inquiry, about which I have heard good things. We need to put into the job of defence acquisition people who are intrinsically good at it, rather than those who do it because a gap has opened up for the next two years. We need to ensure that those who are best at the job carry on doing it rather than getting moved on quickly. We need a defence acquisition process led by capability rather than by programmes. We need to force the armed forces to make choices between what they want to be able to do, instead of piling up ever more unrealistic shopping lists, egged on by the defence industry, and unrestrained by any functioning process in the Ministry of Defence.
	Finally, we need to tell the people about the importance of what the Ministry of Defence does. We need to tie it in with our national interests and explain why it is important to the people. This is a defence-oriented nation. If there is a war, we are more than likely to be involved in it. This country does not want to be an also-ran nation. We have interests all round the world, which we want to protect, and citizens at home and abroad whom we must defend. That, after all, is what Government is for.

Ann Winterton: On the day when this debate was announced, I asked the Leader of the House at business questions whether, in a week when four young soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan, it was a good idea to hold such a debate on the day of local and European elections. She said that the reason for it being held on that day was that there would be no vote. There are no votes on most Thursdays because of the ridiculous modernisation programme the House has undertaken in recent years, and I suggest that it is an insult to our armed services that the debate is being held today.
	Notwithstanding that, the debate has been excellent, and I am sure that, after my contribution, it will continue to be so. Before I move on to the main part of my speech, I want to pick up one or two issues. The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon), who, sadly, has just left the Chamber, said that as a history teacher she taught that since the second world war the peace had been kept by the European Union. That is absolute stuff and nonsense. The peace has been kept by NATO, and we should remember that.
	I also want to cross swords with the hon. Lady, and the Secretary of State, on co-operation and further integration in defence policy and acquisition through the European Union. I remind the House that one of the reasons why we have a shortage of airlift capacity is that the A400M aircraft was commissioned, if that is the right word, in the days of the Government led by John Major. It was due to be delivered in 2007, in the light of which the order for Hercules J aircraft was diminished. Therefore, our lack of airlift capacity is because of the European Union's incompetence in co-operating to fulfil its obligations. The Minister for the Armed Forces is shaking his head—

Bob Ainsworth: Frowning.

Ann Winterton: Well, both are equally bad; I would much prefer that he was cheerful.  [Interruption.] He is smiling now, and that is good.
	I listened to the Secretary of State with a great deal of interest. He made some interesting points, other than that which I just referred to, which chime in many ways with other things happening in defence. The recent Whit recess gave me a welcome opportunity to read the speech made at Chatham House on 15 May by the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, entitled, "A Perspective on the Nature of Future Conflict." Some very important issues were raised in that speech, which I believe are worthy of further debate—especially as the supertanker of United Kingdom defence policy is slowly changing course, although not as fast as the Americans are changing policy and adapting to the realities of present conflicts.
	Let me quote a paragraph of General Dannatt's speech. He said:
	"The first point of consensus, as the National Security Strategy sets out, is that, 'for the foreseeable future, no state or alliance will have both the intent and the capability to threaten the United Kingdom militarily, either with nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, or with conventional forces'. Self-evidently this statement has profound implications for Armed Forces that are still largely equipped, trained and structured for a particular view of conventional state on state warfighting—and particularly so, when the threat spectrum is both more complex and demanding. It is difficult not to conclude that our focus on preparing and equipping for a particular type of conventional state threat has left us unbalanced. Our enemies have adapted. So must we."
	The question that I pose to the House this afternoon is "Have we, and will we?"
	The House will have to forgive me if I stick to my last, but before I do so, let me observe that what General Sir Richard Dannatt was saying was more or less what the Secretary of State was saying. The campaigns in which we are currently having to be involved are connected with what I call "next-war-itis". They are predominantly concerned with counter-insurgency and reconstruction. Perhaps the changes that may be coming will feed through to quicker, smoother and more effective procurement which will support the needs of troops on the ground.
	We began badly in Iraq with the Warrior, which had no air conditioning and was hardly ideal for conditions of heat and humidity. Then the Snatch Land Rover was to be replaced by 166 disastrous Vector Pinzgauers. The Vectors were initially highly praised in many quarters, but I believe that those who have been injured or have died in them have been failed by the media, the parliamentary scrutiny system and indeed the Army itself. It is no good the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), saying, as he did during defence questions on Monday,
	"Its problem has been its 'operationability'".—[ Official Report, 1 June 2009; Vol. 493, c. 10.]
	I assume that he meant that it did not live up to expectations, but—with due deference to the Minister—we knew that before the Vector was deployed, and in my view it should never have been deployed at all.
	I suggest to my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Defence Committee, that he and the members of his Committee should consider an inquiry into the issue. I think that what has happened is a national disgrace—not just the cost, but the loss of life in particular.

Gerald Howarth: As my hon. Friend knows, I saw the Vector before it was unveiled. I happened to be driving the ordinary Pinzgauer. One of the questions that I asked at the time was whether the new armour being added to the vehicle required a strengthening of the suspension. I was told that that was not necessary.
	My hon. Friend has done a tremendous job in fighting battles on behalf of our soldiers who have not been provided with adequate equipment. May I ask her a question that I asked the Minister on Monday, when he failed to answer it? What sort of evaluation process does the Ministry of Defence have, given that the Vector was passed by a technical evaluation? We are not technical people in the House, and we must rely on technical people in the Ministry of Defence, but it appears that that is where the failure occurred. Has my hon. Friend a view on that?

Ann Winterton: My hon. Friend makes a good point. I was once given a briefing at the MOD when I argued with a young gentleman about the Vector Pinzgauers. I said to him that bearing in mind both that the driver was right over the wheel and also the plain, ordinary physics of how bombs explode and where deflections go, it would be a death-trap, and it has proved to be so. I have stated the following many times in this House, and I will state it again on later occasions, because in politics we sometimes have to keep on repeating and repeating before finally, it is to be hoped, someone takes up the point being made: the design of vehicles is vital to saving the lives of the people in them. Unless that point is grasped within the MOD, we are whistling in the wind.
	The Snatch Land Rover has now been upgraded to the Vixen and more than 200 Huskys have been procured at a cost of just under £600,000 each. They will prove to be another failure, replacing an earlier failure. The Americans rejected this vehicle as it sustained a hull breach on the mine resistant ambush protected—MRAP—level 1 standard test.
	The 401 Panther command and liaison vehicles, which cost a cool £413,000 each, have taken longer than the duration of world war two to bring into service, with constant upgrades. They are in every way an expensive and inferior vehicle and were originally capable of NATO standard mine protection STANAG 4569 level 2a, which roughly translated means that they have protection against 6 kg of explosive, but they will be put into operation where 7.5 kg Russian mines are prevalent. Will the Minister please confirm in his winding-up speech whether the latest £20 million upgrade has taken protection up to level 3a and 3b, and if he cannot do that today, will he please drop me a note?
	When the procurement of the Jackal—or M-WMIK, as it was initially known—was announced, it was agreed that it would be good for special forces. Too much emphasis, however, was placed on the David Stirling, world war two concept when equipment acted as the predator, whereas the Jackal, by being used for general duties, has now become the prey. I remember a discussion on Radio 1 in which a young Territorial Army private infantry soldier who had just returned from Iraq took on a sergeant who was extolling the Jackal's brilliance by explaining the faults with the vehicle. What listeners were not aware of was that the TA private soldier was in civilian life an engineer working in force deflection, and in the TA he was a "pioneer" dealing with explosives. The 200 Jackals in service, and a further 110 Jackal 2s, have again highlighted the failed concept of bolting on armour, as proved by the American Humvee vehicle. Can the Minister confirm how many Jackals have been lost, because some reports suggest the number is as high as 20 per cent. of those deployed in Afghanistan?
	The whole protected vehicle fleet is, in General Dannatt's word, unbalanced, because if we add to the vehicles that I have previously listed the Coyote, Viking, Tellar and Warthog, then compared with the 306 Mastiffs, 157 Ridgebacks, 90 Wolfhounds and 24 Bushmasters, blast-absorption vehicles with added armour vastly outnumber blast-deflection vehicles which have their defence built into the original design of the distinctive V-shaped hull.

Bob Ainsworth: I know that the hon. Lady studies this issue and always tries to bring some thought to it, but she must accept that we cannot put all our people into the same kind of vehicles. We have to give them a range of different vehicles of different sizes. We have to try to mitigate the effect of using a smaller vehicle, and that can be done only to a degree. The main protection of the Jackal is its massive manoeuvrability; it does not have to go down the well-trodden path. If the hon. Lady goes to theatre, she will know that it is a very well thought of vehicle among all ranks.

Ann Winterton: It may be very well thought of by some, but I would not like to hazard a guess as to how many young men have been killed in it unnecessarily. I will leave the subject there and move on, unless the Minister wants me to give way again.

Bob Ainsworth: The hon. Lady is suggesting that there is some easy alternative that would give our people the capability that they need to do the job and yet remove if not the entire risk, a lot of the risk associated with the Jackal. I do not believe that she is correct.

Ann Winterton: I hope that the right hon. Gentleman does not think I was born yesterday. War is bloody and people get killed in it, but what is desperate is the fact that this country has not supported its soldiers in conflict with the right kind of vehicles, which can be obtained, and has instead made major mistakes in procurement. He and I are not going to agree on this subject, so I should move on because I have made my point and we have had our disagreement.
	Blast absorption vehicles are not cheaper, and when they encounter an explosion not only are the occupants killed or maimed, but the vehicle is a write-off. Compare that with the record of the Mastiff: only one early version was lost due to a fire, and although there have been injuries sustained in explosions, nobody has yet been killed.  [Interruption.] I shall come to something else in a minute—I am making a point now. The Oxford Mail reported last Tuesday that four local soldiers—I believe that they are from Bicester—escaped injury when their Mastiff hit a mine. One of them, Captain Fletcher, was quoted as saying that the Mastiff afforded great mobility across the desert terrain of Afghanistan and, despite its weight and size, afforded unrivalled protection. The vehicle was able to drive away after the explosion under its own power—compare that with the fate of the two soldiers killed recently in a Jackal in the very same area.

Bob Ainsworth: rose—

Ann Winterton: May I continue? Again on Monday, the Minister with responsibility for defence equipment and support, who has returned to his place, praised the Coyote and the Husky, which is likely to be another useless and death-threatening procurement. However, he was right about the Wolfhound, which should prove to be good news. I find it so distressing to hear lavish praise being heaped upon the procurement of vehicles that are potential death-traps and to listen later to expressions of condolence to the families of those who have perished in them.
	Just as the Buffalo was originally condemned by the MOD but is now being purchased, I hope that the Department will look again at the new version of the Cheetah, which has been developed by Force Protection and was recently shown to members of Congress on Capitol Hill. I fully support the efforts of South Carolina Congressman Henry E. Brown to promote this MRAP vehicle to ensure that both British and American soldiers are properly protected. I am also convinced—Ministers might be interested in this—that Force Protection vehicles could be turned into successful half-tracks if greater manoeuvrability was required.
	The Secretary of State is quoted in this month's  Soldier magazine as praising the new American military direction, which includes the cancellation of their equivalent of the future rapid effect system—FRES—project and suggests that we need a similar readjustment in the UK. Perhaps the UK has accepted that concept in principle, but it certainly has not yet done so in practice.
	I will end by quoting again from General Dannatt's speech at Chatham House. He said:
	"We must ensure we do enough to succeed and simply not enough to fail".
	Although I am delighted that General Dannatt has changed his views since he took office, the danger is still that we are not changing fast enough—not just in terms of vehicle procurement, but in many other areas. When we talk about the budget today and future budgets, I would remind the House of the amount of money that has been wasted on equipment and vehicles that have not been fit for purpose. If those disastrous decisions had not been made, more resources would be available to spend on what the soldiers fighting in Afghanistan need now.

Crispin Blunt: I concur with the remarks that have been made so far on the timing of today's debate on the day of the European and local elections. I am sure that the Ministers would agree, if they were allowed to say so. There is nothing to add to the chorus of condemnation of that choice.
	However, it is two days until the anniversary of the 65th anniversary of D-day and that is another reason why I have chosen to speak in this debate. I am proud that my uncle, Major-General Tony Richardson, is president of the Normandy Veterans Association. I am delighted that the Prince of Wales will attend the celebrations. The issue was sadly mishandled and the Ministry of Defence failed to appreciate the importance of the 65th anniversary. Given the presence of President Obama, it would have been better if Her Majesty the Queen were to attend, but at least the Prince of Wales is going.
	I am also delighted that my uncle had the opportunity to take his grandson, Captain Max Ferguson of the US army, to visit the beaches a week or so ago. The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon), who is no longer in her place, and my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) attended a presentation by Captain Ferguson, my cousin and godson on his 15 months in Iraq as an infantry platoon commander, commanding a troop of Stryker vehicles and some 40 soldiers—

Ann Winterton: I attended too.

Crispin Blunt: Indeed, and I listened with interest to my hon. Friend's remarks about military vehicles. I commend her campaign and the attention she has given to the issue. It is right that Ministers should be put on the spot for the decisions that they have to make, although I acknowledge the difficulty of those decisions and the trade-offs that have to be made. It is important that we have hon. Members willing to dig down into the detail and track procurement decisions. My hon. Friend has done a signal service in holding Ministers to account on the issue, and that is how Parliament should work.
	My cousin, Captain Ferguson, was ambushed when riding in a Stryker vehicle. It is well regarded by the US army, but that did not stop him being nearly killed when it was hit in Baghdad. One of the soldiers in the vehicle was killed and the young soldier sitting next to him was badly wounded. My cousin was lucky enough to survive and the vehicle was able to drive away from the ambush.
	My cousin's presentation was a remarkable story of 15 months in Iraq, in 2007-08, from a platoon commander in the US army. It was particularly instructive to hear how much of the US concept of operations in Iraq had become more like the British one—in terms of hearts and minds, and living alongside the community in which they were operating in order to draw intelligence from it and take the fight to the terrorists. One can only reflect on that change and what happened to the British forces in Basra—there was almost an inversion of roles over the last six years.
	Rather more sombrely, and again involving what I would regard as my family—my former regimental family—on Saturday, Lance Corporal Nigel Moffett became the first fatality of the Light Dragoons in operations in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The regimental family of a regiment the size of the Light Dragoons is quite small. There are only about 400 or so serving in the regiment at any one time, and that fatality brings home the pain and pride in the sacrifice made by Lance Corporal Nigel Moffett.
	I did not know Lance Corporal Nigel Moffett. I left the regiment a rather long time ago now and he joined it in 2003. In reading the tributes paid to him by his commanders, his contemporaries and his father, one is struck by and able to visualise the sort of character that this young man was. I want to take this opportunity to draw on those tributes and to try to give the House the sense of the sort of young men and women who are serving our country on operations today. His squadron sergeant-major, of C Squadron, the Light Dragoons, Sergeant-Major David Rae, said in tribute:
	"My first memory of Moff was of a young lad about to learn his trade in Bovington. Even at an early age he was not convinced his aspirations would be met in the regiment he was allocated; instead he wanted to serve as a reconnaissance soldier.
	I would see him daily with a 50lb...pack on running the training areas to become fitter and stronger than those around him. I enquired as to why he was training so hard whilst others were enjoying the freedom gained from leaving Basic Training, his answer was simple, 'I want to be a 'recce' soldier and I need to convince them I am going to be one'. These words and his dedication had me wishing if only every young man had this zest for soldiering and this commitment to their chosen career. He was granted his wish and joined The Light Dragoons.
	Again we crossed paths when I assumed my position as Squadron Sergeant Major. Moff was more experienced having been on tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and unbelievably, fitter and stronger than when we first met. He was the Squadron Physical Training Instructor, and to a man, we all paraded under him for PT with more than a little apprehension of how we would fair under his 'training'.
	Moff took no prisoners and never eased off, regardless of how hard people were blowing and regardless of what rank they were. The Legion"—
	that was the nickname of C Squadron the 13th/18th Royal Hussars when I was in it, and is now the nickname of C Squadron, the Light Dragoons—
	"expected nothing less than a professional approach from him and we all benefited hugely from his expertise."
	His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gus Fair, who has a special forces background, said:
	"He relished his role as a Physical Training Instructor and was always the first to volunteer for a course or adventurous training. His dedication, fitness and sheer enjoyment of his work marked him out as a star of the future and a role model to the junior soldiers.
	He died at the top of his game and showed all the potential of realising his ambition of serving as a badged member of UK Special Forces."
	However, it is his father's tribute that is the most moving:
	"Nigel felt he was prepared for operations in that he was well trained and had the right tools for the job. Both he and his family understood that ultimately he could die although we didn't want this to happen. Ultimately, Nigel was a soldier."
	This week, we have had almost a fatality a day. The fact that Lance Corporal Nigel Moffett has as part of his regimental family someone who has ended up in the House of Commons is purely a coincidence, but the tributes paid apply to all the soldiers who have died over the past week and the perhaps more than 300 soldiers—I do not know the numbers—who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan serving our country since 2003. We should also not forget that for every fatality that we mark at Prime Minister's questions by naming these soldiers—now, seemingly, every Wednesday—rather more seriously wounded soldiers are coming back from theatre whose lives will be completely dominated by the experience that they have suffered serving our country.
	Of course, in addition to that, we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the psychological consequences for soldiers who are taking part in operations of an intensity perhaps unseen in large parts of the second world war, despite their coming from a country that is effectively at peace. We, as a country, obviously have to pay our debt and make sure that soldiers who have been wounded seriously, physically and psychologically, are supported properly.
	We also owe the soldiers who are serving us something else. I shall now make, as gently as I can, a rather serious political point. The Americans are seriously reconsidering their strategy in Afghanistan. That has important implications for how we conduct our operations in Helmand province. Our forces in Helmand province are being joined by a large number of US forces as we speak. Sadly, whatever the merits and capabilities of Defence Ministers, we have a Government and a Parliament that have lost their authority, and there is now a serious requirement. If we are to discharge our debt to soldiers who are fighting and dying for our country, we must regain the authority of the Government and the Parliament that those soldiers serve. In the circumstances, that can be done only by the people giving a new mandate to a new Parliament and Government. I hope that Ministers and people more widely will reflect on the fact that right now, we in Government and Parliament are not giving the quality of leadership that we should give to those men and women serving on our behalf.
	The speech made by the shadow Defence Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox), and the speech with which the Secretary of State opened the debate contained important reflections on the conduct of our operations in Afghanistan. Afghanistan and Pakistan cannot be taken separately. At the strategic level, they must be dealt with together. There are obviously particular problems about our ability and capacity to give direct help in Pakistan, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Defence Committee, made clear. However, in a sense, and in strategic terms, Pakistan is a much more important entity than Afghanistan. The threat from Pakistan's weapons of mass destruction, the size of its population, and the size of the British Pakistani population—given that I am shadow Minister with responsibility for counter-terrorism, I am only too aware of the domestic issues in that regard—mean that Pakistan is much more important than Afghanistan, but they are very much linked.
	On Afghanistan, I want to reinforce what my hon. Friend said about localism; he referred to the provincialisation of policy there. That is extremely important. Due to issues of geography and ethnicity in Afghanistan, a central authority has always struggled to exercise authority in a comprehensive way over the whole country, and if that is the model that we are trying to follow, we simply will not succeed. It would appear that we are learning, albeit all too slowly, about the methods that will achieve our objectives. Last year I was lucky enough to see the young officer cadets of the Afghan national army being trained by British forces in Kabul. As has been said in this debate, the training and mentoring—effectively the creation—of that army is gradually emerging as an important success.
	Of course, that sits alongside the catastrophic failure of the training and development of the Afghan national police. It is the Afghan national police with whom the average Afghan is in contact daily. Certainly when I was in Afghanistan a year ago, their corruption, criminality, ineffectiveness, inefficiency and the rest appeared to be making a more negative than positive contribution to our potential success in the conflict. I was struck by the parallel that my hon. Friend drew with the Charge of the Knights operation, and there does appear to be a parallel, given the Americans' entry into the southern part of Helmand province and the Prime Minister's indication, which my hon. Friend quoted, of a change in the nature of the British role in Afghanistan. We should be involved in an informed way in those negotiations, so that we can see what they mean in terms of the number of troops who are committed, and for our future commitment to, and concept of, British operations in Afghanistan. It is difficult to be a part of those negotiations, however, when the country is in political limbo and the future of the Government is uncertain.
	The Secretary of State's speech also contained some important reflections. He answered my intervention—up to a point—about the balance of resources between the Department for International Development, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence in contributing to reconstruction, to reconciliation and to rebuilding failed states. However, he did not quite get around to saying this: conflict is probably the most important driver of poverty, and, if we cannot address conflict, we cannot address poverty.
	We will have to look seriously at the balance of resources and compare the money that DFID appears to have with that which the Foreign Office and the MOD have to devote effectively to defence, diplomacy, infrastructure building, state building and everything else. There is a complete imbalance between the interests of the people whom we are trying to serve, not least in their simple relief from poverty, and the very much wider set of British national interests that must be secured in the states that we seek to help.
	The Secretary of State introduced an interesting discussion about cyber-security. From the words that he used, he appeared to talk about the MOD's responsibility to secure its own information technology, but, given the capacity for a cyber attack, from a state-sponsored hit all the way down to terrorists trying to attack the information technology that controls key parts of our infrastructure and, even, to the lone hacker, we must have a better discussion of cyber-security.
	Particular thought must be given to, and an examination made of, the MOD's role and responsibility for securing civil national infrastructure, because, if information technology systems were attacked from outside by whatever source, there would be crippling consequences for the United Kingdom, as, indeed, there would be for any country. We, as a nation, must decide who will take responsibility for that. Currently, the lead appears to be sitting inside GCHQ, but that comes with a whole variety of compromises in respect of how public it will be in providing that defence. On that issue, there is an important debate to be had.
	I listened with wry amusement to the remarks about Bernard Gray's expected report on reorganising procurement. I could not help but have a sense of déjà vu about the issue, because the idea that we must be able to do procurement a great deal better appears to have been a constant over decades. From my examination of the issue during my 15-year association with it in one way or another, however, I have been struck by the fact that the United Kingdom appears to do defence procurement rather better than many—indeed, the majority of—other nations. I do not know whether we are still in such a position in the global league table, but I am slightly suspicious of a proposal to rip up all our defence procurement arrangements and of the idea that, if we replant them slightly differently, we will achieve the golden objective of producing the most efficient set of such arrangements in the world and save ourselves a vast amount of money. Systems can always be improved, but I wonder whether a revolution in the defence procurement process is necessary. I hope that when Mr. Gray produces his report, it will be looked at carefully—and sceptically, because there have been many efforts in the field, and not all have improved matters significantly.

Quentin Davies: rose—

Crispin Blunt: If the Minister will forgive me, I shall not give way. I want to conclude my remarks, as two Members wish to speak before the winding-up speeches begin.
	I began my remarks with a personal reflection about my family and my wider regimental family, and I want to finish by saying that we must not forget the enormous contribution made by our servicemen and women. That is why I am horrified at the circumstances and timing of this debate. It is about a very important subject; our fellow citizens who are serving their country are fighting and dying for us. I do not think that Parliament has distinguished itself with the choice of timing for a debate on the contribution that those people are making.

Bernard Jenkin: I echo my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt) and join the chorus of disapproval for the lamentable state of this debate and its timing.
	I invite the House to reflect on what we face at this moment in the Afghan conflict. I have in front of me the Op Herrick casualty and fatality tables, issued by DASA—Defence Analytical Services and Advice—up to halfway through May. I shall not dwell morbidly on the numbers, but this year is likely to be worse than last year. The rate of casualties this year so far is higher than at the same point last year; on the current trend, we will have more casualties this year than in any year since the conflict began. The fact that there is only a handful of colleagues from both sides of the House in this debate sends a lamentable message about how much the House cares about the issue. That is not a criticism of right hon. and hon. Members; as we know, a very great many, if not all, care deeply about the matter. However, given that the Chamber is so empty this afternoon, there is something wrong with the mechanism used to discuss these things.

Bob Ainsworth: rose—

Bernard Jenkin: I see the Minister itching to intervene.

Bob Ainsworth: I have listened to the stream of criticism from Members about the timing of the debate, and I understand people's anger. However, let us reflect on our own responsibilities for the situation. There are lots of Members from both sides who spit before someone gets the word "modernisation" out of their mouth. We have a system in which we have five defence debates per year on the Adjournment and nobody from the various parties is prepared to get together, make suggestions and talk constructively about a better way. It is a disgrace—but it reflects on us, and we ought not to throw the blame elsewhere.

Bernard Jenkin: I was not throwing blame; in fact, I was trying to avoid that.
	We must change the current system, and I have some suggestions to make. We have not had a debate on a motion on Afghanistan since Op Herrick began. If there were a debate on a Government or Opposition motion as to whether we support the current policy in Afghanistan, I am sure that a great many colleagues would attend and take part.
	I have a suggestion for my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Defence Committee. It is our job as a Select Committee to sit down and discuss how defence issues are debated and scrutinised in the House as a whole, and we could make recommendations about whether there should be some changes. For example, should the five debates be on debatable motions tabled by the Government in order to find out whether the House had confidence in the aspect of policy under discussion, thereby allowing the Opposition parties to table amendments and divide the House on them?
	There is another disadvantage to these very broad debates. When we come into the Chamber, we think that we are going to discuss defence in the world, and then hear announcements about equipment, points raised about spending on research and development, and tributes paid to individual servicemen. It is too broad and unfocused, and a debatable motion might improve the focus.
	I am afraid that I am going to ignore Iran and North Korea, Russia and Georgia, Somalia and piracy, and all the other issues challenging global security. Having long called for a debate on Afghanistan alone, I shall concentrate on what is going on in Helmand and what flows from it. The question that must preoccupy us is whether more foreign troops in Helmand would break the deadlock. I would hazard three reasons why that might not be the case. I somehow doubt that more kinetic effort, more bombs and bullets, more helicopters, more knocking on doors in the middle of the night to try to find the terrorists, more civilian casualties, and more alienation would not lead to more insurgency.
	It is tempting to believe that the strategy pursued in Anbar by General Petraeus, which empowered the Anbar tribes to take charge of their own security, in co-operation with the American military forces and the emerging Iraqi forces, might be replicated in some way in Helmand. However, that is to misunderstand the very different nature of tribal society in Helmand compared with that in Anbar. Anbar was firmly anchored in an established nation state with a strong sense of national identity—Iraq. That national identity exists to some degree in Afghanistan, but the tribal loyalties are far stronger, and, in the case of the Pashtun tribe, span its borders, as they reach into the ungoverned tribal areas of Pakistan. Pashtunistan is a country that exists in the minds of everybody who lives there—it is just not drawn on the maps that were left by the British empire. The Pashtuns have very strong tribal traditions. Pashtunwali is the honour code that requires someone to avenge the death of one of their kinsmen, which means that the effect of civilian casualties is perhaps 10 times more corrosive than in Anbar. The conduct of counter-insurgency operations therefore has to be 10 times more careful to avoid civilian casualties than in Anbar.
	There is cause for optimism, because I believe American policy is shifting and developing. My hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State quoted General McChrystal, who has been nominated the American commander in Afghanistan and who has said:
	"If defeating an insurgent formation produces popular resentment, the victory is hollow and unsustainable".
	He went on to say:
	"This is a critical point. It may be the critical point. This is a struggle for the support of the Afghan people. Our willingness to operate in ways that minimise casualties or damage—even when doing so makes our task more difficult—is essential to our credibility."
	I put it to my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt), who served with the Light Dragoons, that that sentiment would be familiar to any soldier who served in Northern Ireland. Counter-insurgency is about tying one arm behind one's back to observe legality, proportionality and rigid discipline to a strategy. It is about ensuring that the tiniest things do not get blown up into huge strategic problems. That is extremely difficult, and I believe that the American army has learned counter-insurgency far faster than we ever imagined it would. We have to stop pretending that we in the British Army do it much better than everyone else, because the Americans have caught us up and may even be overtaking us in their capability to deliver it.
	There is hope, but I remain sceptical about whether large formations of foreign military forces will work in a country where the foreigner is regarded with great suspicion, especially if he arrives carrying powerful weaponry and destructive power. I am sceptical about whether the big American surge will solve the problem. There are two more reasons for that, one of which is stated in the Government's own paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Page 9 of that paper, in section 3, "Afghanistan—the current situation", states: "The solution remains political". Although there are other factors, the problem has been the political failure in Afghanistan, to which I tried to draw the Secretary of State's attention—the failure in Kabul, the failure of the Karzai Government, the Bonn constitution and the western-imposed Afghan national consensus, and the corruption of that Government.
	The Government's paper continues:
	"Governance is beset by corruption and lack of capacity, which is compounded by the lack of security. The combination of insecurity, poverty, lack of good governance and social and economic development, and perception of widespread corruption"—
	that word again—
	"deepens the challenge of persuading the people to back their government over the Taleban...the insurgency has not been delivered a decisive blow".
	Clearly the surge in operations in Afghanistan is an attempt to deliver that decisive blow, but it seems to me unlikely that it can be delivered by military means. It must be delivered by other means—by binding in the tribal structures that exist in that strong society in Afghanistan and recognising that the authority of the Kabul Government simply does not, and never will, extend into the outreaches of that extraordinarily disparate country. Governance has to arise from the strength of the local communities and cannot be premised on some abstract constitution that was written at a conference in Bonn with a substantial part of the Pashtun tribe simply not represented.
	My other reason for scepticism is that the pivotal, decisive strategic engagement has shifted out of Afghanistan and is taking place in the Swat valley. That seems to be where the weight of Taliban power is concentrated. It is where they are based and from where they launch their operations. The war in the Swat valley may be the conflict that turns the war in the whole region, in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Crispin Blunt: My hon. Friend is correct. However, until military operations are properly co-ordinated across the international border, the effect could be that the Taliban who do not wish to stand and fight against the Pakistan regular army are pushed out of the Swat valley, go to southern Afghanistan and head off to engage with our forces in Helmand and other coalition forces in Kandahar. Proper strategic co-operation is needed, so that if the Pakistani army conducts such an operation, it at least beats the Taliban over the international border into, for example, the prepared ambush positions of Afghan or coalition forces, as appropriate.

Bernard Jenkin: I agree with my hon. Friend to some extent, but even he is dealing at a sub-strategic level. That leads me to my next point about the importance of Pakistan.
	I commend the Government for including Afghanistan and Pakistan in the same document, although we were slightly playing catch-up with the Americans, who were already on that track. However, Pakistan is crucial. There are 800,000 citizens of our country who have Pakistani origin.  [Interruption.] The Minister says that there are probably more. However, thousands and thousands of untraceable exchanges and movements between Pakistan and our country are a direct security threat to our streets, towns and cities.
	The part of the document that assesses the current situation in Pakistan refers to the "severe challenges" facing the Pakistan Government, the sharply deteriorating economic situation and the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks. It states:
	"This shocking event reflected the wider problems Pakistan faces with violent extremism and terrorism. Al Qaida continues to operate in the FATA... Afghan groups also train and plan attacks on international and Afghan targets in Afghanistan from the FATA."
	The document goes on to refer to the
	"separatist insurgency continuing in the province of Baluchistan"
	and makes the crucial claim:
	"So far, however, there are no signs that terrorism or violent extremism in Pakistan are decreasing."
	Until we address that problem, how will we tackle others?
	I have mentioned in the House previously my concern about the disproportionality of our effort. We are putting so much effort into Afghanistan, yet so little into Pakistan. I am encouraged by the Americans' determination. The section of their paper entitled, "Assisting Pakistan's capability to fight extremists" states:
	"It is vital to strengthen our efforts to both develop and operationally enable Pakistani security forces so they are capable of succeeding in sustained counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. In part this will include increased U.S. military assistance for helicopters to provide air mobility, night vision equipment, and training and equipment specifically for Pakistani Special Operation Forces and their Frontier Corps."
	Bravo to the Americans! They are providing the capability that will give the Pakistani military the confidence and the capability to tackle the modern threats instead of preoccupying themselves vainly with the non-threat of India.
	How does that compare with what we offer? On page 13, the Government's document, under the heading "The UK's strategic objectives", states that we will help Pakistan
	"achieve its vision of becoming a stable, economically and socially developed democracy and meet its poverty reduction targets"
	and encourage
	"constructive Pakistani engagement on nuclear security and non-proliferation."
	Those are laudable aims, but to what do they add up when dealing with the crunch problem? The document states:
	"In December... we announced our largest bilateral programme of counter-terrorism support and capacity-building, worth"—
	wait for it—"£10m."
	Ten million pounds is not a great deal of money, Mr. Deputy Speaker. As a country that has an extraordinarily close relationship with Pakistan, we could leverage the American effectiveness hugely, if only we devoted more resources and people to what the Americans are trying to achieve, but we are simply not doing it. I do not know what special forces may or may not be doing in Pakistan, and that is not something that I intend to ask the Minister about. However, what we are providing, in terms of our official armed forces personnel in Pakistan, our diplomatic mission and our overseas aid effort, and in our military-to-military relationship, is pitifully small. Pakistan is a friendly country, but what is coming out of Pakistan is the main threat to our country today, and we are spending a pitifully small amount on confronting that threat.
	Finally, the third grand strategic point for the United Kingdom in considering the topic of defence in the world is this. If we are to be a country that contributes something substantial to our security, and if more troops are needed in Afghanistan and the Americans are sending more, what will be the consequence of our being unable to do so or simply refusing to do so? What will be the consequence of our simply not providing the resources that our security requires in the region?
	We also have the Basra parallel in Helmand—a point that I was going to raise in my speech, but which several of my right hon. and hon. Friends have already raised—whereby we have failed to deliver what our closest ally felt entitled to expect at the outset, namely a relative proportion of the effort, willpower and sustainment to deliver that sense of solidarity. For everything that our brilliant armed forces achieved in Basra, we left behind a feeling that we had not pulled our weight. For all the sacrifices that our armed forces made, what a terrible tragedy that that should be the feeling in much of Washington and much of the American military establishment, and the same looks to be happening in Helmand. With 17,000 US troops coming into Helmand, against our 8,300 to 8,500—I acknowledge that we are putting in the extra 700 for a temporary period—how will we be entitled to our share of command? How will we be entitled to take credit for whatever is achieved?
	I know that those are political points, but we are underselling our influence with our most important ally. So much of what we do in defence and security policy is about maintaining influence over the one country that guarantees our defence and security. If we lose that influence, we will lose the leverage that this country, uniquely in the world, has an opportunity to use, and not just to the benefit of this country, but to the benefit of Europe and the whole world. I am talking about the ability to broaden the American perspective and encourage the Americans to bring more people with them, rather than finding themselves fighting on their own. We must address that, but to do so we need to address our entire defence and security policy, as my right hon. Friend the Chairman of the Defence Committee said. We need to ask ourselves what sort of country we really want to be.
	Whichever Government are in power, we will fight our way through this period of stringent financial controls as a result of the recession and getting our debt back under control. We will get through that, one way or another. We need to nurse our defence forces through what will be a difficult period, but what will we be aiming for at the other end? Will we be aiming to be the power that can project military force throughout the world, fight alongside the United States and maintain its influence in the forums of the world because we will maintain our nuclear deterrent and have aircraft carriers, strike aircraft and the breadth of technological capability that means that we can interact and fight on a global basis? Or are we going to become just another passenger on the American aircraft carrier, with little say and little influence over an increasingly unstable world that threatens the safety and prosperity of our citizens and the people we represent?
	We have been feeling pretty sorry for ourselves throughout the expenses crisis in the past few weeks, but I invite right hon. and hon. Members to reflect on the fact that there are people who are facing far greater challenges and dangers and far more pain than we are. In the end, we are letting those people down by asking them to take on global challenges without having a policy to match those tasks with the necessary money and political will to ensure that they succeed.

Bob Russell: The international community is preparing to commemorate the 65th anniversary of D-day, but in Colchester, a much fresher and more raw anniversary will be marked next week. It will be the first anniversary of the deaths of the soldiers of the 2nd battalion, the Parachute Regiment in Afghanistan. I want primarily to talk about Afghanistan this afternoon. I see no change from a year ago in the support that we are getting from our European allies. On this European election day, perhaps I can be a bit Eurosceptic for once. A year ago, 16 Air Assault Brigade, which is based in Colchester, was in Helmand province. Ten soldiers from 2 Para lost their lives, and the brigade lost more than 30 in total.
	Last autumn, at Prime Minister's questions, I challenged the Prime Minister about the need for more of our European allies to deploy ground troops in southern Afghanistan. The Ministers on the Front Bench today will know that I have raised this issue on other occasions as well, including as recently as this Monday at Defence questions, when I asked the Secretary of State:
	"Will the Secretary of State list the countries in the European Union that have deployed ground forces to southern Afghanistan?"
	He replied:
	"Yes, I will: Romania, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia and Belgium".—[ Official Report, 1 June 2009; Vol. 493, c. 13.]
	He went on to say that France was flying fast jets in the south of Afghanistan, but my question was about ground forces.
	Let us pay tribute to Romania, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia and Belgium for deploying ground troops. However, that answer highlights the failure of the other European nations in NATO that talk the talk, but do not walk the walk when it comes to southern Afghanistan. What are France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland doing? They are big countries, but they have not deployed ground forces to southern Afghanistan. If there are constraints on those countries—constitutional reasons, perhaps—that prevent them from deploying troops, they can still assist in other ways. They could assist with security measures, medical support, logistics and a whole range of other things. They could provide helicopters, for example. However, I do not see much of that happening.
	I hope that, in highlighting this issue in my brief contribution to the debate, I can persuade the British Government to bring pressure to bear, through their contacts, on the other European countries in NATO to deploy ground troops. We cannot expect only the United States, the United Kingdom and some of the smaller countries of Europe to do so.

Crispin Blunt: It is easy to criticise our European partners in this matter, but we should remember that the authors of this strategy were the British Government. When the right hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (John Reid) was Defence Secretary, he thought it appropriate to deploy NATO in this fashion—as it is deployed in Afghanistan—and he drove that policy very hard. I do not think that our European powers were wildly enthusiastic about it, which has now partly been reflected in the quality of their contribution. We did not get the strategy sorted out at the beginning, so the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) is effectively reflecting on one of the consequences of that failure.

Bob Russell: This is a NATO exercise as far as I am concerned, and the consequences of whatever goes wrong in Afghanistan are exported to mainland Europe as well as to the United Kingdom. Whatever the background as to why we are where we are, I want to make my point as strongly as I can.
	I have already mentioned that it is European election day today. Every Army married quarters in my constituency is located within the Maypole Division, and there are military families living in St. Michael's, Montgomery and Drury Meadows estates. I want to put on record the fact that within the last 24 hours, leaflets have been distributed there saying that Liberal Democrat policies include
	"Establishing a Single European Army".
	That is simply not true. I do not blame Conservative Members who are here, as they did not put the literature out, but it did go out in the name of their party. When we are talking to military families, I believe that we must be 100 per cent. factual: it is wrong to deceive, mislead or whatever. Those families have enough issues on their plate without being told untruths of that sort. I do not support a European army. It is quite clear from what I have said that we want European collaboration and support, which is a world of difference away from having a European army.
	I believe that all of us are united when we participate in defence debates in the House. Through my involvement with the armed forces parliamentary scheme on two occasions and my membership of the Committee considering the Armed Forces Bill, I have sensed that there are far more areas of common agreement than disagreement. Of course there are some disagreements, but everyone here today is, I believe, broadly of the same mind and united in our support of Her Majesty's armed forces. I pay tribute to them, and to the increasing role played by females. As Members may have gathered from the question that I put to the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon), I draw the line at females being in the front line of the infantry. That is not to say that they should not be in the front line in many other respects, but I am sure that my point is well understood.
	As I indicated by my question to the right hon. Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Defence Committee, I also pay tribute to the role played by soldiers—some airmen and sailors, but predominantly soldiers—from the Commonwealth, and I would like to conclude by drawing the House's attention to early-day motion 1516. It pays tribute to Lance-Corporal Johnson Beharry, VC, who Members may recall was subjected to a vicious verbal attack by the British National party, which questioned his heroism. The early-day motion rebuts those wicked words of attack on him. It says:
	"That this House...is proud that HM Armed Forces comprises men and women from all ethnic backgrounds, from the UK and the Commonwealth, plus Gurkhas from Nepal; notes as an historic fact that people of all racial groups served, and lost their lives, fighting fascism in the Second World War and thus helped to preserve this country's freedoms against such evils; deplores the use in BNP election literature of a false photograph of a British soldier, with false quote, claiming support for the BNP; and urges the Government to ensure that the British people are made fully aware that the BNP represents the views which Britain went to war to defeat."
	It is appropriate to quote that early-day motion on the day of the European elections, and when the House is discussing defence in the world.

Julian Lewis: I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) on what he has just said. I was proud to sign his early-day motion and I would like to reassure him about one thing. I do not know what the parliamentary term for "scum" is, but when people such as those in the British National party behave in the way he described, we can be all the more reassured about how right we are to condemn, oppose and disrespect them and all their works. I only hope that, despite all the provocations from Westminster to our constituents, they nevertheless have the maturity and good sense to do the same to the BNP in the elections today.
	However, in the spirit of partisanship, which I cannot entirely resist, I say to the hon. Gentleman that if it were not for the Liberal Democrats' policy of proportional representation, the prospects of the BNP leader entering the European Parliament would be much smaller.
	In March 2008 I had the privilege of giving a joint presentation—I must stress that I was very much the junior partner—to a group called First Defence, of which I was the parliamentary chairman. The presentation was entitled "Counter-Insurgency in Principle and Practice". I was talking about some of the principles of counter-insurgency, but the person everyone came to listen to was Dr. David Kilcullen, who was talking about his experiences in practice in Iraq.
	One of the most important points about people such as Dr. Kilcullen—who was, among other things, a special adviser to General Petraeus and subsequently to Condoleezza Rice—is that the architects of what we hope will be the ultimately successful strategy in Iraq are also some of the people who are least dogmatic about the methods that one can adopt to deal with terrorists and insurgents.
	In his book "The Accidental Guerrilla", which has just been published, Dr. Kilcullen says that in many cases the people against whom we find ourselves fighting would not have taken up arms against us had we not gone into their countries in the first place. That is a message that one gets from all parts of the House, although it is at the same time acknowledged that sometimes, even though such fighting is a consequence of our having had to go into those countries, we had little alternative. However, as Dr. Kilcullen stresses, we should do so only as a last resort.
	I have pointed out previously that there are some similarities between orthodox political campaigning and the methods used by terrorist groups, albeit not in the moral dimension. There are at least five principles that terrorist groups adopt. I shall quickly list them. The first is:
	"always fight on ground where you are strongest and your opponent weakest".
	The next two are:
	"always seek maximum impact for minimum effort"
	and
	"try to manoeuvre your opponent into a situation where he is damned if he does, but damned if he doesn't".
	That is precisely what I described in relation to the reaction, in the case of Afghanistan, when an attack was mounted against the American homeland from a country in which it would be difficult and bloody to intervene. The last two principles are:
	"use your opponent's own weight to drag him down ('military jiu-jitsu')"
	and
	"apply these methods simultaneously and repeatedly".
	To a large extent, the methods adopted by the Americans and the British have been to try to use conventional military power against such unconventional enemies. We need to try to avoid being bled dry, however, in a form of warfare that involves fighting on the enemy's strongest ground, not ours. Of the many wise words in Dr. Kilcullen's latest book, which I commend to Members in all parts of the House, he says:
	"In military terms, for AQ—
	al-Qaeda—
	"the 'main effort' is information; for us, information is a 'supporting effort'...Thus, to combat"—
	al-Qaeda—
	"propaganda, we need a capacity for strategic information warfare—an integrating function that draws together all components of what we say, and what we do, to send strategic messages that support our overall policy."

Bernard Jenkin: Quite right.

Julian Lewis: I am glad my hon. Friend says so. Dr. Kilcullen continues:
	"Building such a capability is perhaps the most important of our many capability challenges in this new era of hybrid warfare."
	It has been difficult for colleagues to get to grips with a subject as broadly defined as defence in the world. I entirely agree with the suggestion by my hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) that such debates are too broad in nature. My view is that the older concept of the single-service debate concentrated the minds of hon. Members, and concentrated the subject matter in the context of the various campaigns in which we were involved or likely to become involved.

Bernard Jenkin: Traditionally, in the past few decades, we have conducted such debates in peacetime. We are now debating a war, and it is absurd that we include it in a general debate about defence policy. It does not make sense.

Julian Lewis: I accept that point, but even in the context of debating a war, it would be better not only to have specific debates on the specific combat parameters but specific debates on the individual services. Otherwise, we will see reflected in the debate the internecine conflict going on between those at the most senior levels of the armed forces. My hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Ann Winterton)—who has carried out a very focused campaign about armoured vehicles and their inadequacies—has touched on that issue, too. She referred to the change in the nature of warfare, and to a particular speech that, she said, meant that we must move away from preparation for conventional state-on-state warfare towards configuring the main effort of our armed forces for the type of wars in which we are engaged today.
	I have raised that subject previously at the Dispatch Box, and in my opinion people from particular armed services who take that point of view are going up a blind alley, and a dangerous one at that. Although it is terribly important to be able to configure our forces to fight counter-insurgency campaigns, and absolutely vital to ensure that we give our forces the resources to fight them effectively, we must never lose sight of the fact that the primary role of our armed forces must be to insure against the possibility that in 10, 20, 30 or 40 years we might face an existential threat to the peace and freedom of our homeland. I for one do not subscribe to the view that we must dismantle our ability to deter, and if necessary combat, another state armed with modern weapons systems that could threaten us in the future, just because for the foreseeable future we do not think that threat will arise. The lesson of the past, whether the late 19th century, the first half of the 20th century or even the post-war conflicts of the second half of the 20th century, is that when such threats materialise, the vast majority have not been anticipated.

Nick Harvey: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Julian Lewis: I am afraid not, because I have three minutes left. Please forgive me.
	I was impressed by what the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon) said about the past role of Porthcawl and the massing there for the D-day invasion. I have heard similar stories about my home town, Swansea. Swansea bay was the home of the second wave of the invasion armada. No part of the water could be seen, so packed was it with the vessels that were about to sail across the channel.
	I was somewhat less impressed by what the hon. Lady said about the European Union keeping the peace. I must point out to her that the European Community, in the form of the European Coal and Steel Community, did not come into existence until 1953, and the common market itself did not come into existence until 1957. I do not think that there was any appreciable diminution in the threat of western Europeans fighting each other after 1953, or even 1957, than there had been between 1945 and 1953 and 1957. What really matters is whether the individual countries of Europe have democratic political systems. If they do, they will not fight each other, and if they have NATO, it is to be hoped that they will not have to fight anyone outside their boundaries either.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Select Committee, drew attention to the horrific prospect of a black hole in the defence budget. I have pointed out before, and I will point out again this evening, that we are in a strange situation. The defence budget as a proportion of GDP has remained constant both before and after the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which can only mean that we were fighting two counter-insurgency campaigns at one stage, and are fighting one counter-insurgency campaign now, on what is effectively a peacetime defence budget. That really cannot go on.
	Let me say this in the last moments allocated to me. It is normally quite difficult to sum up a debate because there have been so many contributions. By the end of this debate we shall have heard six speeches from the Conservatives, including the two from the Front Bench. That is more than we shall have heard from the other two parties put together. There will have been three speeches from Labour Members, and two from Liberal Democrats. That is not the way in which we should be debating the most important defence matters of the year.
	As no one is listening, let me conclude by sharing a confidence with the House. I actually rather like and admire the Defence Ministers who have been appointed by the Government, and I know that they probably did not want the debate to be held on this day any more than anyone else did. The question is: who did want that, and why? To hold a debate of this sort on a day when everyone is voting in elections suggests either a calculated insult or a complete disregard for—or misunderstanding of—the importance of the subject matter. I know that the Ministers will have done their best, but who was responsible? Was it the Chief Whip? Was it the Prime Minister? I think we should be told.

Bob Ainsworth: Despite the lack of density on the Benches, we have had our usual wide-ranging, thoughtful and informed debate. The Secretary of State opened it with a review of current operations, and a more detailed account of the evolving threats that we face and his response to them. I shall make a few comments on those issues, and then try to respond to all the points that Members have made.
	We cannot afford to ignore the lessons of current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must capture and institutionalise them. The integrated military and civilian structures that we now have on the ground in Helmand have developed the hard way. We need to use them as a blueprint for how we do things in the future, not in theatre but in Whitehall and in the international context. That is why we in the MOD, together with our colleagues in the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, lend our full support to the Defence Committee's inquiry into the comprehensive approach. I believe that the Committee, chaired by the right hon. Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), can make a valuable contribution, and may be able to help us all to drive the policy a little further.
	Looking ahead, we also need to ensure that, despite the economic challenges, we get the balance of decisions right so that, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, we can "stretch, surge and recover". There are two elements to that. First, we must understand the capability mix that we need in order to fight both present conflicts and those we may face in the future. We must not be starry-eyed about the options open to us. We do not have the scope that the Americans have to flex budgets from hybrid warfare to conventional warfare. We have to get more out of our equipment and we must have flexibility from our people—we have that—and we must use it to the full. We must also think across the full range of our responsibilities. Secondly, we must ensure that our own financial controls and acquisition structures help rather than hinder our efforts to drive down costs and deliver timely capability. I think that Bernard Gray's report will be a very good starting point for the work that we need to do on that.
	Finally, we need to make our international institutions as effective as possible. We need to make them relevant to the public they are supposed to serve. The UK must work with our partners to drive forward reform in the international sphere: in the United Nations; through a new strategic concept in NATO, the cornerstone of our defence; and by strengthening the European Union's ability to play the role that it undoubtedly can.
	I understand why many Members throw their hands up in frustration—or in downright antagonism—whenever Europe is mentioned, as it can be frustrating, but we cannot hope to counter the threats of today on our own. We must persevere in building flexible solutions rather than fuelling bureaucracy. I believe we have managed this well in the anti-piracy operation off the horn of Africa, where we have provided command and effective co-ordination not only for our European partners, but for many other nations as well.
	The hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) discussed the rules of engagement for piracy and why pirates were released recently by the Royal Navy. That was not down to a lack in the rules of engagement; we have flexed the rules of engagement to make absolutely sure that our people are able to counter the threat of piracy, but we also have to respect the fact that we are getting a lot of assistance from Kenya. It is happy to take people to where we have the evidence to prosecute them, but we should not—we must not—abuse the hospitality, as it were, given by the Kenyan nation. Therefore, where evidence does not exist, we need to be sensible and disarm and destroy inappropriate equipment and be prepared to set people free. The kinetic element is only part of the structure being put in place to counter piracy, and of course I accept that it cannot be dealt with purely within the maritime environment. The Royal Navy is holding the ring for us and is providing some mitigation, but the problems of Somalia are the cornerstone of the issue.

Bernard Jenkin: I just wish to make it clear that I am sure that the rules of engagement reflect the legal advice that has been given, and that I make absolutely no criticism of the commanding officer of the ship involved, but will the Minister explain what is wrong in law with detaining someone who clearly has all the paraphernalia of piracy and is, circumstantially at least, exhibiting a threat? This seems inexplicable. The law must be deficient in this regard, and it must be changed even if we need a UN resolution in order to be able to do so.

Bob Ainsworth: Yes, but whose law needs to be changed? We have to take these steps while accepting what the Kenyans are prepared to do for us and being enormously grateful to them for their efforts. Let me say, as I said at Question Time, that I have no intention of allowing the Royal Navy to be used as a taxi service for asylum seekers—that will not happen while I am Minister for the Armed Forces and if that means that we have to set people free off the coast of Somalia, we will do so. We will do what we can in the circumstances.
	The hon. Member for North Essex said that he thought our attitude to the American capability on counter-insurgency was arrogant. I do not see that arrogance in our military and I do not believe it exists in the body politic in this country either; there is great respect for the work that was done first by General Petraeus in Iraq and which is now preached by General McChrystal in Afghanistan. Huge leaps have been made in capability and doctrine by the American military. We must recognise that, and we buy into it totally—we need to work alongside them.
	The hon. Gentleman and the Chair of the Defence Committee talked ably about the complexities involved in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and said that much more needed to be done. I do not detract from that at all, but we need to understand that Pakistan is a sovereign nation, it has its own priorities and red lines and it is a very important player in this circumstance. We have to work with the Pakistani Government and not attempt to impose something unacceptable on them.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs. Moon) is a new member of the Defence Committee, and I thank her very much for her effort and the work that she is putting in on that Committee. She lamented the lack of recognition that there is for our armed forces. I genuinely believe that there has been a phenomenal improvement in that regard over the past couple of years, which is much welcome. It is deeply welcomed by the people at the hard end—those who do the fighting and the dangerous work on our behalf. Sadly, as many in this House recognise, she is right to say that a recognition of their amazing capability and the amazing people that they are does not transfer to the level of understanding that we need among our population about the issues with which our forces deal. We all have a duty and a responsibility to try to work on that and improve that understanding.
	My hon. Friend responded to a question from the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell), who later raised the issue again, on women in close combat. We are reviewing the issue and we will do so without prejudice or precondition. The situation is not simple because there is no simple front line. We have women who are involved in logistical operations—supply lines and so on—in Afghanistan and they have effectively involved themselves in close combat, because they are obliged to do so. As we review this, we must take into account the complexities of the warfare that we are fighting and the fact that female members of our armed forces are, from time to time, in the thick of it, alongside their male counterparts. I do not think that we can have a politically correct situation on the one hand, or have prejudice on the other. We have to be objective as we undertake the review.
	The hon. Member for Colchester also raised the issue of the despicable literature—there is cross-party consensus in the House on its nature—from the British National party about Johnson Beharry, and I am glad that he did so. I am not free to sign his early-day motion, but if I was, I would rush to the Table Office to do so.

Crispin Blunt: Next week, Bob.

Bob Ainsworth: That soon!
	I have agreed to finish my speech shortly, and I am aware that I have not managed to reply on all the issues. The hon. Member for North Devon (Nick Harvey) recognised the huge improvements to vehicles that have been made, but he was very concerned about helicopters. We will soon have a Merlin free to go to Afghanistan, and before the end of the year we will have eight Chinook too. There has been a massive increase in the number of hours of helicopter availability, but we can never have enough helicopter lift and I accept that we need to do all that we can to provide it.

Madeleine Moon: The Opposition have claimed that no one was listening to this debate. I can advise my hon. Friend that I have already received an e-mail from a gentleman who does not live in my constituency, a veteran from Penzance called Mr. Brian Jenkins—not the Member with the same name. He served in the armed forces between 1969 and 1971 and he has been following the debate today. I am sure that many others also have.

Bob Ainsworth: I thank my hon. Friend for that information, but in response to the many hon. Members who have complained about the timing of the debate, I must point out that we all share a responsibility for failing to work together. If people are unhappy that we have five defence debates on motions for the Adjournment, they should stop spitting every time the word "modernisation" is mentioned and be prepared to work with others to put the defence debates on a better footing. If there were a genuine cross-party attempt to do that, it would be successful.

Liam Fox: It is clear to anyone who has followed the debate that the complaint has not been about the number of debates, but that the Government business managers purposely put this debate on today, polling day, when a minimum number of Members would be present to take part. It was also squeezed by a topical debate, so that one of our full defence debates—on some of the most important issues, including Afghanistan—was allowed four hours in the parliamentary year. That is a disgrace.

Bob Ainsworth: The hon. Gentleman is being disingenuous. He and his party pushed for the topical debates. If we are to be genuine about this, we need to accept that if we want five debates on defence on the Adjournment, there will be consequences. If we wanted to change that, we could—

Ann Winterton: Will the Minister give way?

Bob Ainsworth: No, I am about to conclude. I will respond in writing to Members whose points I have not managed to address. I know that the hon. Lady has asked me to do that on one particular issue.
	While we plan for the future, our focus must always and rightly remain on current operations in Afghanistan. Our people are fighting and, sadly, sometimes dying to bring stability to that benighted country. They are entitled to expect 100 per cent. support from everyone in defence, Government and industry. That is the very least that they deserve.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House has considered the matter of defence in the world.

Business without Debate

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Ordered,
	That, at the sitting on Wednesday 10 June, paragraph (2) of Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments) shall apply to the Motion in the names of Mr Elfyn Llwyd and Angus Robertson as if the day were an Opposition Day; and proceedings on the Motion may continue for three hours or until 7.00 pm, whichever is earlier, and shall then lapse if not previously disposed of.—( Ian Lucas.)

SAFEGUARDING CHILDREN (PRIVATE SCHOOLS)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. —(Ian Lucas.)

Sally Keeble: I am grateful to have secured this Adjournment debate on an important subject. It is perhaps appropriate that it should take place on a day when there are local government elections, as a tier of local government deals with education. It is precisely that that I want to talk about.
	The subject of the debate is a general one—the safeguarding of children in private schools—but I will draw on a specific example in my constituency, which is the case of St. Peter's independent school. The aim of this debate is to call on the Government to give children in private schools the same level and type of protection as children in state schools; to ask the Government to close a loophole that leaves directors of children's services unable to intervene in independent schools to protect the welfare and safeguarding of children in the same way as they can intervene in state schools. Children should have the same safeguards whatever type of school they are in and those powers should be exercised locally by the local authority, which has overall responsibility for protecting the safety of children in that local authority area.
	I am not going to go into all the events surrounding St. Peter's, despite the protections that this Chamber provides. There are children studying at that school and their interests have to be regarded. There are also children in my constituency who were former students at the school and their private interests must be regarded, too. I also want to stress that this is not a matter of private schools versus state schools. Many independent schools have very good practice in child safety and well-being, as they have in education. There are also associations for independent schools that provide support and advice in these important areas. Those factors were all well documented in Roger Singleton's excellent review of safeguarding arrangements in independent schools.
	The problem that I want to identify and focus on is what more is needed to ensure that there are proper safeguards in place for the small minority of independent schools that fall through the net, and where standards are not acceptable to ensure that any problems can be dealt with quickly and locally. Although I am drawing from an example in my constituency, that issue is also of wider concern to directors of children's services in other parts of the country.
	In the case of St. Peter's, the lack of proper safeguarding arrangements and the lack of powers to allow the local authority to intervene have had serious and continuing consequences for some of the children and, indeed, for their parents. I would argue that much of the delay in dealing with the problems, because of the lack of adequate powers to be operated at a local level, has made the situation more acute for everyone concerned.
	Back in 2000, an Ofsted inspection of St. Peter's found:
	"The school has many strengths and few weaknesses; it provides a good education."
	Significantly, it found:
	"The school has a brief but adequate policy on child protection."
	It also found:
	"There are sufficient suitably qualified and experienced staff to teach most areas of the curriculum satisfactorily".
	In 2006, there was a further inspection, which again found that St. Peter's
	"is a good school and is successful in its aim of providing a good all-round education for pupils with a wide range of abilities. There is outstanding provision for the personal development of"
	children. It found:
	"The overall welfare, health and safety of pupils are satisfactory. The school maintains a high level of care for pupils",
	and
	"The school has due regard to the safety of the pupils. Policies are comprehensive and include procedures for child protection, anti-bullying strategies, First Aid, health and safety issues and fire safety."
	It also found that the school met most of the requirements for registration. That was in November 2006.
	Just 18 months later, some constituents came to see me expressing concern about events at the school—first one parent, then two, then a group. Their concerns were about educational issues, about some issues relating to school resources and facilities, such as problems with cleaning and furniture in the school, and about some specific allegations of unacceptable or inappropriate behaviour. Those were the matters of real concern to me. Whatever the educational issues—parents are entitled to make choices about the type of education that they want for their children—the allegations about behaviour seem to me to be absolutely straightforward. They should have led to the relevant people being suspended, be they students or staff, so that investigations could be carried out according to a proper, established, recognised procedure so that remedial action could be taken and things could be put back on course. That is the kind of thing that many of us have, unfortunately, seen happen in our local authority education or children's services. It is not a sign of great success, but it is a sign that there are safeguards in place to deal with problems when they arise.
	Let me indicate the nature of the allegations made. I do not want to go into all the details, but they were of children being hit; of children having their personal information disclosed in front of their class; of children being left in classrooms with a video camera on them in the absence of a teacher; of a girl being made to change in one of those classrooms with the video camera on; and of the arbitrary and inappropriate punishment of children. There are more, quite substantial, allegations of that type.
	On taking up my constituents' complaints, I found that a police-led inquiry into the allegations had already been set up, involving local agencies including the local education authority and a representative from the school. As it turned out, that representative was a trustee who was involved with a local firm that had acted on behalf of one of the members of staff about whom allegations had been made. The firm is also now involved in legal action against some of the parents.
	I spent a considerable amount of time in the summer of 2008 trying to find a way forward for my constituents, and that included a lot of discussions with colleagues at the Department for Children, Schools and Families here in Westminster. Eventually—and it was eventually—Ofsted agreed to conduct a further inspection. In addition, the Charity Commission set up an inquiry into the trust that owns the school. I also spoke a number of times to Ministers in the DCSF and, of course, extensively to the director of children's services in Northamptonshire, as well as to the police and other agencies. I have to say that getting action on this matter was one of the most difficult, frustrating experiences that I have ever had. Despite the obvious concerns of my constituents, at every turn the argument was that no one had the power to do anything. In particular, and probably most importantly, the local director of children's services did not have the powers to act that he would have had if St. Peter's had been a local authority school.
	So what was the result of all the complaints? When the Ofsted inspection report came out in September 2008, it found that
	"St Peter's Independent School does not meet all the regulations for independent schools, and in particular the overall provision for pupils' welfare, health and safety is inadequate. This is primarily because safeguarding procedures are inadequate. The failure to properly safeguard pupils means that the overall effectiveness of the Early Years Foundation Stage is inadequate."
	It listed 30 recommendations that the school had to follow to meet the standards required for independent schools. Among the shortcomings found by Ofsted was the fact that although all the staff, with two exceptions, had been subject to Criminal Records Bureau checks, a number had not been vetted at the required enhanced level. The chair of governors had not carried out all the necessary checks on board members, and there was not robust enough checking of staff, including those who had lived outside the UK, before they were appointed. The child protection policy was not up to date, comprehensive or implemented effectively. There were other criticisms, too.
	A notice was served on the school requiring it to produce an action plan. That is now being progressed, and there has been a further report from Ofsted, which was quite supportive. The Charity Commission's report on its investigation into the school found shortcomings in the workings of the trust that runs the school. Those shortcomings included the fact that the trustees
	"did not manage the risks arising from the allegations and complaints"
	made by parents, had failed to comply with the commission's first directive, and had provided the commission with misleading information, although they later co-operated and had been working to put things right.
	The police finished their report and passed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service, which decided not to prosecute. However, the CPS, in a letter to me, concluded:
	"The allegations of assault amounted to incidents which would be categorised as common assault for the purpose of charge. This is significant as charges of common assault have to be brought within six months of the date of the alleged offence. All of the allegations which, in my judgement, amount to allegations of assault fell outside that six month limit. Furthermore, one allegation of assault was said to have been committed on a school trip in France, taking it outside the jurisdiction of the English Courts."
	 Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 9(3)).
	 Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. —(Ian Lucas.)

Sally Keeble: I thought that that the sub judice rule was about to be raised, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because I had mentioned something that might be before the courts.
	The problems for the family who made the complaints continue. Those who took their children out of the school, or had them excluded due to the events surrounding the allegations, are being pursued by the school for repayment of fees, despite the fact that the children were sometimes removed due to events that were well outwith the parents' control. One family was taken to court after they removed their child. They lost their case, the school was awarded costs and the family declared themselves bankrupt and lost their home.
	Another family are being taken to court, and the discussions are that their child might be called on to give evidence about events that a child would not normally be expected to give in open court. Basically, it is evidence about an indecent assault, and it seems wholly inappropriate even to consider trying that in court as part of a debt recovery action. A third family are also in the early stages of having legal action taken against them, and a number of others have settled privately after their children were excluded.
	It seems that this is a very unsatisfactory conclusion to a very poorly managed sequence of events. First, real questions must be asked about why Ofsted was so lax in finding the difficulties at the school, and why it needed so much persuasion to undertake the necessary investigation to put in place an action plan to resolve the problems. For example, how in 2000 did it find:
	"The school has a brief but adequate policy on child protection";
	and, in 2006, that there was
	"due regard to the safety of pupils. Policies are comprehensive";
	but then make, in 2008, a whole list of recommendations for the action that would be needed to bring safeguarding policies up to standard?
	It also seems completely inexplicable that in 2000 Ofsted should find:
	"There are sufficiently suitably qualified and experienced staff to teach most areas of the curriculum satisfactorily,"
	but then that the school does not even have a process for properly CRB-checking staff to the right standard, and that it does not necessarily vet staff properly before it gives them jobs and allows them to teach at the school.
	It is also wrong that events that take place in respect of a school cannot be prosecuted because they are out of school time or take place on a school trip. It is even worse if events take place on a school trip—when the school is acting in place of the parents. If they take place in the UK, at least the children can speak to their parents in the evening. It seems completely wrong also that such events should be immune from any other form of investigation or sanction.
	One reads in the paper complaints of teachers having their careers ruined because of false allegations of assault, and they are extremely worrying, but, equally, it is important that there are procedures for dealing with allegations of behaviour that might fall far short of criminal conduct but breach rules for professional conduct. They might require not prosecution but some local sanction—for example, in the school, through training or improvement, or through measures to deal with the children's behaviour, if that is the problem. It is also wrong that the problems had to escalate to the point at which prosecution was even considered; I would have thought that behaviour in schools would be of a far higher standard. Such problems should certainly not be allowed to persist.
	The parents should have been able to get their complaints dealt with quickly. If the school was not prepared to deal with them, they should have been able to get prompt local action. As it was, things had to be escalated so that they were dealt with by Ministers and Ofsted, which, obviously, has a vast array of other schools and issues other than safeguarding to deal with. In this instance, it was required to do things that properly should have been done at the first stage by the local authority.
	Furthermore, it is wrong that national intervention was needed by not only Ofsted but the Charity Commission. Our local children's services director knew about the problem. He had extensive dealings with it and knew what type of resolution was needed. However, he was completely powerless to act, short of removing all the children from the school. That would have been completely counter-productive and probably open to legal challenge.
	Since all this happened, the Government have commissioned a review by Roger Singleton to consider safeguarding arrangements in independent schools, non-maintained special schools and boarding schools. I have contributed to the review. Its recommendations have been largely accepted by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which will consult further on proposals in September. I urge the Department and the Minister to plug the loophole in the legislation to ensure that local children's services directors have the power to intervene on safeguarding issues in independent non-maintained special schools and boarding schools, to protect the welfare of children and make sure that the powers given to children's services directors under the Children Act 2004 extend to independent schools as much as to state schools.
	In respect of private schools, children's services directors need to be able to intervene on the basis of allegations, to investigate and to make recommendations that must be followed to put in place the required changes, just as they can in state schools. They also need to intervene on the governors or trustees of private schools, just as they can with state schools, to make sure that those people are held properly accountable for the safeguarding arrangements, welfare and well-being of the children.
	It is completely wrong that one set of rules on child safety and protection should apply to state schools and another set to independent schools. The safeguarding of children is rightly seen as a matter for the local community. The local community, through the local authority and its children's services, should have the power to protect all children, whatever type of school they attend. They should also have the power to make the process transparent for the public, so that people in the wider local community can understand what is happening and see the safeguards that are put in place.
	State schools have become accustomed to being named and shamed, and that can be a scarring experience for any school. However, it is now understood that the wider community is entitled to a certain level of information about what happens to children in a school, and it is important that there should be the same transparency to the wider community at independent schools as there is in state schools. The constituents who came to me do not get information about what has happened as a result of their children's complaints. They have been left on the sidelines, with significant and substantial problems to deal with as a result of what happened in that school.
	I would not want any other group of parents, or indeed any other MP, to have to be in a position of knowing that things have gone wrong in a school and that nobody is prepared to step forward and say, "I have the power to sort this out." Instead, it is divided around a whole range of different agencies, and it takes, as in this case, many months to resolve problems which, if the local authority had the power to do so, could have been dealt with much more quickly, to the benefit of the children, the teachers and the parents in surrounding areas who might want to send their children to that school. I urge my hon. Friend to ensure that this loophole is closed and that all children, whatever type of school they attend, are given the same safeguards by law.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. Before I call the Minister to reply, let me say to the hon. Lady, who feared at an earlier point that I was going to correct her on the matter of sub judice, that as a significant part of her speech related to a particular establishment, it might have assisted the House if that had been reflected in the title that she chose for her debate.

Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton, North (Ms Keeble) on securing this debate. I know that she has campaigned strongly on this issue, and it is clear from her speech that she considers the safety and well-being of children and young people in her constituency an absolute priority.
	I am sure that we would all agree that those concerns about safety extend across both sides of the House. As Members of Parliament, as a Government and of course as a society, we all recognise that our first priority must always be to keep children safe. Of course, that responsibility extends to all school pupils, whether they are in the independent or the maintained sector. As I am sure my hon. Friend knows, all independent schools must be registered with the Department for Children, Schools and Families. As a condition of this registration, and indeed continued registration, they must meet the standards we would expect of any school in the maintained sector. Those standards include the quality of welfare provided to children and the extent to which they protect the health and safety of each and every child in their care.
	In 2007, the Government introduced the guidance, "Safeguarding Children and Safer Recruitment in Education", which maintained and independent schools are required to comply with. It sets out employers' duties and responsibilities with regard to child protection, including working to locally agreed procedures for dealing with allegations, and the involvement of police and other local agencies. It also sets out the need for all staff to undertake child protection training and for schools to have a designated child protection officer. In short, when a parent opts their child out of the maintained sector, they do not opt out of their child's right to a safe education.
	As I am sure my hon. Friend will appreciate, it is not appropriate for me to comment on individual cases of teacher conduct or specific allegations against staff. However, I can say without hesitation that there simply is not one rule for the maintained sector and another for the independent sector. Local authorities have the same powers to intervene in relation to state and independent schools. If there is any particular issue that she is concerned about, I will be more than happy to meet her to discuss it further.

Sally Keeble: That is absolutely contrary to everything that everybody has said, including several of my hon. Friend's colleagues, right the way through the whole process. It has always been said, and it has been said again this evening by the children's services director, that local authorities do not have the power to intervene.

Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Then I can only reiterate that if the advice that I have been given is incorrect, I will be more than happy to discuss the matter with my hon. Friend.
	St Peter's school is no different from any other in the sense that neither the Secretary of State, the local authority, the police nor social services has the power to force a school to suspend a teacher pending investigations of abuse. The power to make that decision rests with the management of the school alone, and any change to the status quo would require a change in the law. However, as I have already said, there is a statutory obligation on every school, regardless of whether it is maintained or independent, to ensure the safety and well-being of its pupils. Inspections of independent schools follow exactly the same processes as those of any other school, to ensure that those obligations are met. It goes without saying that any school that fails to meet the required standards can be deregistered.
	I am aware of my hon. Friend's concerns about the trustees of St Peter's, but their actions are a matter for the Charity Commission to consider. Our concern has to be first and foremost to ensure that children learn in a safe environment. We rely on local authorities and Ofsted to judge whether arrangements are in place to allow that to happen. Councils have the lead in deciding what safeguarding arrangements need to be made locally, so in the case of St Peter's school it is up to Northamptonshire county council to decide what should apply.
	It is critical to note that there should never be any question of a child's safety being threatened. Local authorities will always have the power to remove any child from a situation in which they might be threatened, regardless of whether that is in an independent or maintained school. Of course, any parent whose child is at an independent school and who is worried about their safety will always be given the option of taking up a place at a maintained school. I shall come later to further measures that we are taking to improve safeguarding arrangements.
	My hon. Friend mentioned Ofsted. I am aware, of course, of the concerns that the agency raised in its inspection of St Peter's last year, to which she referred. She also mentioned previous Ofsted inspections. Inspections are valid only at a particular point in time, and in our experience things can change rapidly. Last year, inspectors highlighted a number of key areas that had to be improved for the school to remain registered and, as she told us, they described safeguarding procedures as "inadequate". They found, for example, that the child protection policy was out of date, that proper Criminal Records Bureau checks had not been carried out and that not all staff had been properly vetted. Clearly, that was totally unacceptable. However, it is important to note that Ofsted found that on a day-to-day basis pupils were generally well cared for, and that children described behaviour in the school as good.
	I am pleased to say that the school appears to have taken the report seriously. Following statutory notice to improve, action has now been taken. As my hon. Friend is aware, inspectors returned to the school at the end of April this year and their report confirms that the school has now addressed those earlier safeguarding failings. A copy of their report has been sent to the school, which will no doubt examine it and further address the inspectors' findings. It is worth mentioning that like maintained schools, many independent schools are inspected by Ofsted every three years, and we will always respond to any complaints about the school in question.
	I hope that I have been able to provide some reassurance that safety nets are in place to help protect children in independent schools, but this is not in any way, shape or form a matter on which this Government are remotely complacent. We are more determined than ever to make this the safest country in the world for all children to study in, regardless of their background. That is why we are introducing, through the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006, the toughest possible vetting and barring system for all those working, or seeking to work, with children and vulnerable adults. It is why we have made CRB checks mandatory for all new appointments to the school work force, and why we commissioned Sir Roger Singleton to review safeguarding arrangements in independent schools.
	Sir Roger's report was published in March, and the Secretary of State immediately accepted every one of his 32 recommendations, which included ensuring that all boarding schools are properly regulated; providing greater support for independent schools to help them improve safeguarding practice; improving information sharing and schools' self-evaluation of safeguarding performance; and strengthening the relationship between schools and their local safeguarding children boards. In addition, Sir Roger has made it clear that he wants to see school proprietors make arrangements for annual, independent scrutiny that would challenge their schools' safeguarding policies and practice.
	A report of that scrutiny will then be made available to the Department, as a further means of strengthening those checks and balances. I know that officials are already working on amending the appropriate guidance and legislation in the light of those recommendations. It is encouraging that Sir Roger's report seems to have been received so well by independent schools as well as local authorities and Ofsted.
	It is worth mentioning the role of the Charity Commission, to which I referred earlier. As a registered charity, St. Peter's—and many other independent schools like it—is answerable to the commission. The organisation launched its investigation into the school in February, and expressed several serious concerns about leadership and the trustees' stewardship of the school. Consequently, it issued a direction to the school to undertake a comprehensive governance review of the charity, including the development of a risk management strategy relating to child protection. As I understand it, that was to include staff training as appropriate. I know that the commission has since been very positive about the way in which the trustees of St Peter's have accepted the challenge. I believe that the school has taken on board all the commission's regulatory advice, guidance and recommendations.
	I know that some concerns remain about the progress that St Peter's needs to make, with Ofsted highlighting key areas that need to be addressed, including careers guidance and pupil assessment. However, the school now appears to have turned a corner following the visit that Ofsted inspectors made last year. A new leadership is in place, safeguarding procedures have been strengthened and efforts have been made to improve school buildings and clean them. Perhaps most important, all staff in the school have now been subject to an enhanced CRB check to confirm their suitability to work with children.
	I am sure that much of that is down to my hon. Friend's hard work and persistence. Like her, the Government set the bar at nothing less than absolutely parity of safety and well-being for every child in this country. That applies not only to those from disadvantaged backgrounds or from poorer areas. It applies to all children, from all walks of life, at all schools.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 House adjourned.